My involvement in the Rafferty-Alameda experience began by accident on September 20, 1985. I was working in the Intergovernmental Affairs Branch of Premier Grant Devine's own department, the Executive Council, when I was asked to fill in for an ailing colleague and attend a meeting on the Rafferty Dam with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in North Dakota.
I grabbed the file on the project as I left the office. At the Regina airport I introduced myself to the engineers from SaskPower, who seemed less than overjoyed at having what I'm sure they thought was a political hack from Devine's office tagging along. During the hour-long flight from Regina to Minot, I reviewed the file - a mishmash of handwritten notes and minutes of meetings - in an attempt to familiarize myself with the project. All I really learned was that the Souris River had a horseshoe-shaped course, flowing south from Saskatchewan into North Dakota, then north into Manitoba where it eventually joins the Assiniboine, which, in turn, joins the Red at Winnipeg.
The engineers told me that there were two Saskatchewan dams under consideration: the Rafferty Dam on the main stem of the Souris near Estevan, and the Alameda Dam; sixty kilometers to the east on Moose Mountain Creek, a tributary of the Souris. They gave me an aerial tour of the river as we headed southeast toward Minot, pointing out the dams that were already in place. It was obviously a heavily managed river. It was equally obvious that it had almost no water in it.
The meeting in Minot was with representatives of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the State of North Dakota, and the City of Minot. Its purpose was to determine whether there would be any American interest in a joint venture to build the two dams in Saskatchewan. To my surprise, on our arrival were furtively shepherded into a small, windowless room in the basement of the tiny Minot airport. This was certainly not typical of any bilateral meetings involving state officials in North Dakota were, by state law, open to the public. The implication was clear: this was a meeting the public should know about.
The discussion was quite technical, and I found it increasingly difficult to follow as the parties, virtually all of the engineers, launched into a complex deliberation of the separable costs and recoverable benefits of potential structures on the Souris. My entire knowledge of Rafferty-Alameda was barely an hour old; the other options they were talking about were all new to me. The Army Corps of Engineers, arguably the preeminent dam builders in the world, told us that it would take them eighteen years to build the Rafferty and Alameda dams. This time frame, they pointed out, allowed for the lawsuits that were now attendant on practically every dam project in the United States, and would be inevitable with Rafferty-Alameda as well. Such litigation was unheard of in Canada at the time, and the Saskatchewan engineers responded with more than a little bravado and smug nationalism that it would only take us three years.
They were wrong.
Never before, or since has a dam project in Canada faced the litigation that confronted Rafferty-Alameda. Within half a year of that meeting in the basement of the Minot airport, I had left the Executive Council to work full-time on the project, first as director of planning and operations and then as vice-president. What follows is a first-person account of what occurred, and why.
The story should have relevance for students of public policy who are interested in how wrong-headed decisions get made by government, and then get justified and defended. It is a timely story for people who are interested in the changing politics of the environment. It will also provide a window on the country's fragmented decision making-process - a result of the entrenched power of the bureaucracy in Ottawa - the increasing influence of special interest groups, and the growing irrelevance of those we elect at both the provincial and federal levels.
Much about Rafferty-Alameda does not fit the usual patter of major projects. It has never been a NIMBY, for instance, a "Not In My Back Yard" project. In fact, it has consistently enjoyed overwhelming support from the people it affects the most. The reasons for this support are regionally and culturally determined; they are steeped in history and the perpetual struggle against the vagaries of a harsh climate, yet were all but ignored during the controversy.
The initial political spin on the project was determined by factors internal to Saskatchewan - its fierce partisan politics on the one hand, and the unstable relationship between the Devine government and its civil service on the other. The difficulties the project encountered with the federal environmental assessment process perhaps constitute its most notorious dimension, but were also self-induced problems as the project wound its way through the provincial regulatory processes. Yet during all the litigation and work stoppages, it was still possible to negotiate an agreement between Canada and the United States to permit American participation.
This is a record of what happened between the Minot meeting in 1985 and the agreement with the last hold-out landowners in 1993, which finally allowed the project to be completed. It is an account of how small and relatively obscure water project can be propelled to national prominence through bureaucratic incompetence and political maneuvering. It is the chronicle of a project that involved complicated litigation through almost every level of court in the country, including the Supreme Court, and became a symbol for environmentalists and major project developers alike. It is the story of a project whose political fate was sealed even before the government of Grant Devine was elected in 1982. It is a tale of infighting within governments and their bureaucracies. Finally, for the residents of southeastern Saskatchewan, it is the story of a nightmare that seemed endless.