Opinion: Is Hydro-Québec Playing Dirty in its Legal Battle with the Innu?

Can the Innu expect justice in their multimillion lawsuit against Hydro-Québec?

I was skeptical before the trial began last fall. Now that deliberations are underway, that skepticism feels justified.

For starters, one of the key witnesses who testified on behalf of Hydro-Québec was paid a total of $147,000 by the public utility before and throughout the trial. Another was offered a part-time consulting job at Hydro-Québec after agreeing to testify on behalf of it, according to court documents obtained by The Rover.

Those witnesses took the stand last winter in a lawsuit brought on by Innu communities who’ve seen swaths of their territory destroyed to make way for hydroelectric dams and transmission lines in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region.

Sources close to the plaintiffs say this is just the latest example of Hydro putting its thumb on the scale.

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The Innu claim Hydro negotiated in bad faith when they put forward a $75 million agreement in principle to compensate them for lost lands during the construction of the La Romaine complex. The deal came after decades of negotiations and two referendums that saw a majority of Innu voters reject Hydro-Québec’s offer.

Finally, in 2014, a majority of voters approved the offer, which included a clause that the parties must sign a final agreement by June of that year.

That’s when Hydro-Québec allegedly changed the terms of their deal. Though the public utility had initially accepted to move forward with the agreement if voters approved it, now they said they needed “unanimity” among the Innu and a promise for plaintiffs in a handful of lawsuits against Hydro-Québec to withdraw their claims.

With the lawsuits withdrawn and a vague promise that there would one day be a final agreement signed, the public utility moved forward with construction of La Romaine — a 1,550 MW network of dams that sit on a river the Innu have used to fish, hunt and harvest plants for generations. The agreement never came.

Once it was clear Hydro-Québec wouldn’t meet their obligations, the Innu communities of Uashat, Mani-Utenam and the traditional council of Mani-Utenam filed a new suit in Quebec Superior Court in 2020. They accuse Hydro of “institutional bad faith” and seek “just compensation” for their losses and $15 million in damages.

Sources close to Innu negotiators say Hydro-Québec paying two of its most important witnesses casts doubt over the sincerity of their testimony.

“It’s hard to consider yourself an objective witness when you’re collecting six figures from one of the parties,” said one source, who is not authorized to speak to the media. “No one’s saying he lied but it gives the appearance of a pretty serious conflict of interest, of a tension between the truth and the truth as your employer wants you to see it.”

René Bourassa was a lawyer in Hydro-Québec’s Indigenous affairs department when negotiations fell apart but retired years before the trial.

The company brought him back to help prepare its attorneys and attend the trial as a consultant. But for months, Hydro-Québec fought to keep the fact that it paid Bourassa $147,000 in consulting fees out of the public record. The Innu’s lawyers were able to argue that it’s in the public interest and on Jan. 24 Bourassa told the court he was paid to attend the trial.

“I never billed Hydro-Québec nor was I paid by (the company) to testify,” Bourassa said, in his sworn statement.

Under provincial law, witnesses can be compensated up to $90 a day for lost time, $61.15 for meals and $166 for a hotel room. In his signed affidavit, Bourassa said he billed Hydro-Québec 64 hours for a total of nearly $20,000 to prepare for his testimony and charged the company another nine hours to sit as a “consultant” in court.

Another key witness for Hydro-Québec said that — months before his testimony — the company offered him a part-time contract to come out of retirement. The witness, Richard Laforest, was an anthropologist who’d worked on the file for Hydro-Québec before he retired in 2018.

After it became clear he would be called to testify in the lawsuit, in 2023, Laforest reached an agreement with Hydro-Québec to work as a consultant for about 15 hours a week. During cross-examination last winter, Laforest said he was set to start his new job in a month. Asked if there was any connection between the job offer and his testimony, Laforest was unequivocal.

“There is no connection,” he said. During cross-examination, Laforest said the initial conversation about returning to work for Hydro-Québec came during the retirement party of a former colleague in the spring of 2023 — about six months before the trial.

The word of these two witnesses is crucial for Hydro-Québec to prove that it acted in good faith and that the collapse of the 2014 agreement wasn’t the public utility’s fault. On a personal level, I’ve heard from a few of Bourassa’s colleagues who say he’s a good lawyer who genuinely cares about Canada’s reconciliation with First Peoples. And in his testimony, it’s clear he was a moderating force within Hydro-Québec.

But when it comes to First Nations, the public utility has a checkered past. The network of dams it created in James Bay during the 1970s was done without the consent of Cree communities who depended on those rivers to live. And in almost every major case before the courts, the Quebec government has argued that Indigenous people shouldn’t have control of their own natural resources, their own child protection services and their own territory.

So while it can’t definitely be said that Laforest or Bourassa’s testimony was tainted by their financial relationship with Hydro-Québec, you can understand why the Innu feel like history is repeating itself. And after all, conflicts of interest are both real and perceived. So even if none of these benefits are connected to the lawsuit, it looks bad. Especially if you’re one of the plaintiffs who lost their family’s traplines to the damming and never saw a dime of compensation for it.

Just a few generations ago, the Innu in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region lived off the land, fishing along the Gulf of St-Lawrence in the summer and trekking north to hunt caribou in the Labrador plateau every winter.

But after massive iron deposits were discovered in the region during World War II, the federal and provincial governments forced the Innu from their traditional territory onto nine reserves in Côte-Nord, Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean and near the mining city of Schefferville. Children who’d thrived in their communities since time immemorial were taken from their families and sent to residential schools.

In the port city of Sept-Îles, clergymen threatened to stop baptizing and burying Innu in Catholic cemeteries if they didn’t clear the land and move to a reserve a few kilometres down the road. Some relented but many refused. You can still see evidence of that resistance if you drive through Sept-Îles, which is a patchwork of white settlers and Crown land that the Innu live on to this day.

As recently as last year, the Innu in both Labrador and Quebec were kept in the dark about negotiations between Hydro-Québec and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador over the future of the Churchill Falls project — a 1,000-kilometre complex of dams and transmission lines that cut through the majority of Innu territory.

And with the Quebec government signalling its intent to build more dams on Innu territory — a prospect that one Innu leader said will “never happen” — the fight over Indigenous land is far from settled.

“I will make a prediction,” said Innu negotiator Rosario Pinette during his testimony last winter. “I don’t know if, one day within our lifetimes, we’ll see another deal (between our communities and Hydro-Québec). We’re not one board of directors speaking to another board of directors. We are a society that has honour it must defend.