‘Colonialist mentality:’ Indigenous groups challenge Quebec over new history museum

Quebec’s minister responsible for relations with First Nations and Inuit says northern communities can’t opt out of paying their electricity bills.

Ian Lafrenière was reacting to a Radio-Canada report that found that members of some Indigenous communities hadn’t paid their electricity for years, resulting in a $250-million bill the utility is reportedly unsure how to collect.

The report said the 15 or so communities who are behind on payment are mostly Cree and Innu nations in parts of the province where Hydro-Québec operates dams or is planning wind farms.

Hydro-Québec confirmed in a statement that it had decided not to cut service to any First Nation or Inuit communities as part of a wider reflection on “economic reconciliation.”

Lafrenière told the legislature that there are communities who have had bad experiences with Hydro-Québec in the past, but he says refusing to pay their bills is the wrong way to send that message.

He says he wants to work with both sides to negotiate a resolution.

“We cannot take justice into our own hands,” he said in Quebec City, noting that the majority of Indigenous hydro clients pay their bills.

Both the Parti Québécois and the Quebec Liberal Party told the legislature the situation could not be allowed to go on.

PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said there doesn’t seem to be equity between hydro customers.

“What we’re saying is that there are people who pay their bills, and if they don’t there are consequences,” he said. “And there are others who don’t need to pay their bills … I don’t see how it will work in terms of equity.”

Québec solidaire’s Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois called for dialogue, saying that Hydro-Québec was created “as if Indigenous people didn’t exist.”

“The path of dialogue and negotiation is to be favoured so that we recognize the rights of all First Nations and pave the way for better relations in the future,” he said.

The Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador was not immediately available for comment.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.

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MONTREAL – Quebec Premier François Legault is under pressure over his government’s investment in a planned battery factory near Montreal, as Swedish manufacturer Northvolt cuts costs following a slowdown in demand for electric vehicles.

Opposition leaders at the Quebec legislature on Tuesday called on the Coalition Avenir Québec government to be more transparent about its agreement with Northvolt for the $7-billion project. They want to know what conditions are attached to the $710 million in public funds the province has already committed.

Legault, who touted the plant as the “greenest electric battery factory in the world” when he announced it one year ago, used more muted language on Tuesday. “When you want to develop, you have to take calculated risks. Otherwise, you don’t advance,” he said in the national assembly. “We think this is a special opportunity for Quebec.”

Normand Mousseau, scientific director of the Trottier energy institute at Polytechnique Montréal, said the Quebec government failed to communicate to the public that the Northvolt deal was inherently uncertain.

“I think the main issue was the fact that the government didn’t present this as what it is, which is a risky investment,” he said. “It was presented as a done deal.”

On Monday, Northvolt announced it is laying off 1,600 employees at its plants in Sweden, totalling one-fifth of its workforce. The company said the cuts have no impact on its plans to build a battery factory in Quebec, a message echoed Tuesday by Quebec Economy Minister Christine Fréchette.

“The project in Quebec remains a priority,” she told reporters. “We were aware that this is a new sector. And any new sector has to live with ups and downs. And so we’ve been careful in order to make sure that the protection of the public money is there.”

Earlier in the day, interim Liberal leader Marc Tanguay said the opposition party wants more details about the deal secured with Northvolt last year, including a “schedule of payments.”

The Quebec government has given Northvolt a $240-million guaranteed loan to help the company buy land about 30 kilometres east of Montreal to build its plant. The government has invested a further $270 million in Swedish parent company Northvolt AB, alongside a $200-million investment from Quebec’s pension fund manager.

On Tuesday, Fréchette confirmed the government could inject another $300 million into the project once construction has started and private financing is in place.

“We need to have a government with transparency and honesty with respect to the taxpayers’ money,” Tanguay told reporters. The Liberals are also criticizing the government for setting aside a 354-megawatt energy block for the project, which former economy minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said earlier this month could be delayed until 2028.

Moshe Lander, a senior lecturer in economics at Concordia University in Montreal, said the government should provide more information about how many jobs and how much revenue the project could generate, and how it plans to make a return on its investment. “There’s almost no transparency other than just the promise that this will be great,” he said in an interview.

Québec Solidaire spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois told reporters Tuesday he supports the development of the battery supply chain in the province, but wants the government to provide “the bare minimum in terms of transparency and information” about a project that he said is in “serious difficulty.”

“Mr. Legault has played poker with the money of Quebecers, and now he seems like he might be losing the game,” he said.

The Parti Québécois on Monday called for an emergency debate in the legislature on the project’s future, but the Speaker rejected the request Tuesday afternoon.

Mousseau said if Quebec wants to get into the electric vehicle battery industry, it has to take some risks and find a better way of explaining the uncertainty.

“If you say, ‘That’s the deal of the century, it will transform Quebec,’ I’m not sure that’s the right way to prepare people for the fact that they’re very risky investments,” he said.

But Lander believes that at this point, Quebec should “cut (its) losses and run,” rather than risk more public funds on a project that might never get off the ground.

“They never really had an exit strategy for how they were going to get their money back, how they were going to make a return on it,” he said. “It’s just further indication that when the government tries to bet on a horse, there is the chance that the gamble is wrong.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.

OTTAWA – Canada’s chief electoral officer is playing down any suggestion that Elections Canada should directly administer political nomination or leadership contests.

In an interview with counsel for a federal inquiry into foreign interference, Stéphane Perrault pointed to the importance of parties controlling their own processes and indicated his agency lacks the resources to administer such contests in any event.

A summary of the August interview was made public at the inquiry Tuesday as Perrault appeared during a public hearing.

Elections Canada has suggested possible changes to safeguard nominations, including barring non-citizens from helping choose candidates, requiring parties to publish contest rules and explicitly outlawing behaviour such as voting more than once.

A report released in June by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians expressed concern about how easily foreign actors can take advantage of loopholes and vulnerabilities to support preferred candidates.

However, representatives of some parties have told the federal commission of inquiry that such changes may be unwelcome, difficult to implement or counterproductive.

In the August interview with the commission, Perrault noted Elections Canada is a “centralized organization that springs into life in electoral districts across Canada when an election is called,” the summary says.

“It does not have the local structures or resources to engage in the ongoing type of operations that would be required to administer nomination and leadership contests across the country.”

Perrault noted that in Canada these contests can occur at any time, including during an election period. “The fact that non-fixed date elections can occur, as well as the existence of byelections, adds an additional level of complexity,” the summary says.

Perrault said that, to his knowledge, no electoral authority in the world with a comparable system administers nomination contests for political parties.

“Mr. Perrault recalled the importance of party autonomy, and the important value of permitting political parties to establish their own rules and procedures for selecting their leaders and candidates.”

He emphasized, however, that just because Elections Canada should not itself administer nomination and leadership contests “did not mean that there should not be additional rules to reinforce the integrity of these contests,” the summary adds.

Perrault indicated that Elections Canada had not yet finalized its recommendations.

The inquiry also delved Tuesday into a cyberattack directed at parliamentarians.

Senate officials say they were told in January 2021 about phishing emails targeting parliamentary accounts — attacks that were later attributed to hackers acting on behalf of Beijing.

Some of the emails made it through firewalls and landed in senators’ email inboxes, but no one opened the messages and the attackers did not gain access to information on Senate servers, the officials say.

They described the chain of events in an interview earlier this month with inquiry counsel. A summary of the conversation was presented Tuesday during inquiry hearings.

The officials said senators’ offices were immediately contacted to ensure any emails were destroyed, and the upper chamber’s information services directorate did a search of the Senate database to check that emails were deleted.

It emerged earlier this year that some MPs and senators faced cyberattacks from the hackers because of their involvement with the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which pushes for accountability from Beijing.

Early on, however, the Senate’s information services directorate was not aware the attack might have been conducted by Chinese hackers.

In any event, the Senate officials told the commission, knowing the source of the attack earlier would not have changed the directorate’s prompt response.

“We treat all these threats seriously, and we act quickly,” David Vatcher, director of Senate information services, testified at the inquiry Tuesday.

Vatcher said the number of attacks linked to foreign states is increasing but represents a minority of the overall attacks the upper chamber faces.

However, he said, the “geopolitical climate is very tense, and it would be crazy to think that these attacks are not going to continue increasing in number and in level of sophistication.”

Benoit Dicaire, a House of Commons official responsible for information technology, told the inquiry that phishing emails intended for eight MPs were quarantined by a security feature and never reached the members.

There are indications that some MPs’ personal addresses received the messages, but these accounts are beyond House of Commons jurisdiction.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.