Peter Schroedter Nov 5 FYI

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2011 (5269 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Those of us Manitobans who lived near the shores of Lake Manitoba are Canada’s newest victims of their government’s deliberate action to deprive them of the use of their property and their livelihoods.

To add insult to injury, this same government tells the rest of its citizenry they are taking good care of flood victims and they are being compensated for their losses.

I’m pretty sure that’s the story that needs to be told so Manitobans don’t catch on to the fact that they and their properties might be the next to be sacrificed for the “greater good.”

I am one of the people affected and even though my losses are minor compared to those who have lost everything, this government-caused flood has become the defining event in my adult life.

The flood and subsequent political response have changed the way I see myself and my place in society. I have lost faith in the very institutions I believed in and would have gone to war and died for.

I believed without question that a democratically elected Manitoba government would never deliberately harm any segment of its own population without fair and full compensation.

Furthermore, I believed to the core of my being that in a democracy, if one political party did not govern justly, another political party would be elected to correct the situation once the truth was known.

By design or by neglect, this democratic process did not correct what happened in Manitoba when the government knowingly flooded more than 2,000 homes and cottages along with thousands upon thousands of hectares of private and public land.

Keep in mind this happened in the lead up to a provincial election.

All of us around the lake were confident that once the campaign got going the flood would become an issue and that, in the democratic process, the politicians would declare their plans to deal with the problem. No one, not the incumbent NDP, Progressive Conservative Leader Hugh McFadyen nor Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard addressed the problem or offered their idea for a solution. Not even the novice Green party rose to the occasion.

Before “the flood” the lake was where I lived, worked and played. We all did. I even did a little commercial fishing.

I knew the lake in all its seasons and loved it like no other. When I travelled abroad and dreamed of home it was the lake I saw. It was my point of physical and emotional reference and our ranching security through all the drought years.

That’s all gone; all that’s left is the never ending day-in, day-out nightmare where all I see and smell are rot, bleached dead tree bones and destruction brought by high water.

Our individual and collective lives have been irrevocably diminished. After six months of being inundated, Lake Manitoba’s flood-affected people have not received public acknowledgement for their losses from the people who caused it, nor was anyone told publicly and honestly why we are forced to endure what occurred at the hands of our provincial government.

I’ll grant that in their fight to cope with the results of decades of inept water-resource infrastructure maintenance and questionable water-resource management practices, they had little choice. It was either us or Winnipeg and surrounding areas that was going to take the water.

They chose us — lucky us.

The long-neglected dikes along the Assiniboine between Portage la Prairie and Winnipeg combined with a long-forgotten and still-uncompleted Assiniboine River Diversion project created the circumstances that led to the unprecedented and overwhelmingly destructive use of the Portage Diversion that resulted in a rise of more than two metres above the lake’s established flood level.

The Assiniboine River Diversion structure and the associated Assiniboine River level control device along with the channel connecting the Assiniboine River to Lake Manitoba were built in the early 1970s.

These were only the first components in a project to protect Winnipeg in case a spring melt event resulted in flooding Winnipeg. The downstream components of the project were never built.

These included dredging to increase the outflow capacity of Lake Manitoba into the Fairford River along with increasing the outflow of Lake St. Martin into Lake Winnipeg.

In 40 years, not one political party managed to find the will to finish the project once the first and most visible parts were built.

Rural people and hinterland ecology have little value in an urban-based political accounting system.

That said, Premier Greg Selinger proudly announced on Nov. 2, after more than 40 years, that an emergency drain out of Lake St. Martin has been completed in record time and for only $100 million. Now all we have to do is be patient and wait another couple of decades while they figure out how to drain Lake Manitoba fast enough to take all the water the Portage Diversion can send.

When the flood came, we in the hinterland watched in disbelief as our properties were intentionally flooded. Most of us believed it would stop before things went critical.

We watched marshes overflow onto pastures. Then the water flowed over the hay land onto croplands into homes, cottages and vacation campgrounds. Fish swam over roads, swamp water flowed into our wells and septic tanks.

Finally, the water was above the fences as it crept further, day by day, until in some places it stood a metre deep more than two kilometres inland from the old shoreline.

When the damages have finally been tallied, and they will at some point in the future, economists and environmental historians will be staggered by the scope and scale of this man-made calamity. Current economic losses are still being tallied but news reports have been tossing around the $500-million figure. When the count is finally in and not affected by current political concerns, my guess is we will see a number north of $1 billion.

The tally at that time will include the real loss in value of personal and business income, destroyed public and private and agricultural infrastructure, lost crop yields and land restoration along with the very deep depreciation of recreational shoreline real estate.

When they calculate the eco-costs of increased greenhouse-gas emissions and shoreline forest destruction, water-quality loss and riparian wildlife-habitat degradation, the real costs will be in the historical record long after people forget the names of the inept political leaders who caused this flood.

Speaking of politicians, it is interesting to note that, before the recent election, Selinger stood proudly and announced loudly to the cameras that flood victims will receive 100 per cent compensation. Once the election was won the message was tweaked and we now hear flood victims will be getting “fair compensation.”

So far, the people who have received either “100 per cent compensation” or any sum that could be considered “fair compensation” — or any meaningful advance to help them through their current economic flood woes — have not made themselves known.

What we have seen in the flood area is a small army of well-meaning officials trying to help simple, flood-affected folk sort our way through the ever-changing Byzantine labyrinth that passes for the flood-compensation application process.

It is common knowledge all around the lake that we should brace ourselves for still more damage because, by official estimates, Lake Manitoba will not drop below official flood level until the spring of 2013 — the proviso being that we don’t get too much snow and rain during that time.

Optimistically, that means we will see two more storm and ice-damage seasons before this man-made disaster is finally behind us. If we get a wet year, all bets are off.

The old folks — my father, a German post-war immigrant, and my father-in-law, a born and bred second-generation Canadian and Lake Manitoba rancher — always said, “Never trust the government.”

I wonder if this is the message I’ll be passing to the next generation. Or do the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters already know that awful truth?

Peter Schroedter has been an Interlake farmer, fisher and recycler since his teens.