A Seal River proposal for all Manitoba’s needs

On Nov. 9, 2017, I stood in the Manitoba legislature and made a proposal whose time had not yet arrived.

I asked the chamber to protect the entire Seal River Watershed, roughly 50,000 square kilometres of intact boreal forest and tundra in northern Manitoba, a complete hydrological system running unbroken from its headwaters to Hudson Bay. No roads. No mines. No power corridors.

One of the last large watersheds left on Earth is still doing what watersheds are meant to do.

It was not a partisan proposal. It was not, that day, a particularly prominent one. The chamber was nearly empty. The proposal did not pass; it did not fail; it simply sat there. Within weeks, The Northern Miner picked it up and brought the idea to the national mining industry. Almost nobody else did.

Nearly nine years later, the proposal I made that day is now before Manitobans.

Public consultation on the Seal River Watershed Protected Area is open until June 2 at EngageMB.ca. The protection is being led by the four First Nations whose ancestral territory the watershed has always been: the Sayisi Dene Denesuline, the Northlands Denesuline, the Barren Lands, and the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree, who organized themselves into the Seal River Watershed Alliance in 2019.

The federal and provincial governments have joined that leadership. The proposal on the table is, in its essential structure, the case I argued for in 2017, but better. It is better because the leadership belongs to the four nations whose territory has included the watershed since time immemorial. And it is better because Manitobans, finally, have the chance to weigh in.

I am writing because Manitobans should weigh in. But I am also writing because the version of the proposal that survives this consultation should be built to last a century, not five years.

There is one piece of that durability, the piece that distinguishes my own submission from much of the conservation advocacy on this file that Manitobans should ask both governments to make explicit.

Whole-watershed protection of the Seal River and a strong Manitoba mining industry are not opposites. They are halves of the same honest location argument.

The Seal River is the right place to protect precisely because there is nothing being mined there to displace. There are no operating mines in the watershed. No advanced exploration projects. No industrial roads. No fly-in mining communities. Protecting it costs Manitoba’s resource economy nothing, not one job, not one royalty dollar, not one piece of stranded capital.

What it does ask of Manitoba, in exchange, is that the working mineral districts where Manitoba’s resource economy actually lives, the Thompson Nickel Belt and its southern extension, the Flin Flon and Snow Lake camps, the Bird River Belt with its world-class lithium and tantalum, the Lynn Lake gold district, and others be just as publicly designated, just as well-supported, and just as durably branded.

Conservation where it belongs. Mining where it belongs. Both designated. Both lasting.

Manitoba’s signature land-use policy of this generation should not be the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area on its own. It should be the IPCA paired with what I have called Manitoba’s Greenstone Parks, a public, statutory designation of the mineral belts that have anchored this province’s economy for a century and that hold critical mineral resources of national and global strategic value.

Without that pairing, the protection risks being misread as a one-way move. The “balance” critique will resurface every political cycle. Capital may read the announcement as a loss. Future governments may be tempted to reopen the bargain.

With the pairing, the public and industry see the trade clearly. Protect the intact watershed. Develop the working mineral belts. The protection becomes more secure, not less, when the areas designated for mining are treated with equal seriousness.

The case I made in 2017 was simple: you do not put a national park on top of an active ore body. The Seal River Watershed is the place you should protect because the watershed is intact. Manitoba’s mineral belts are the places where you mine because they are honestly productive.

That is the compact I would ask the federal and provincial governments, in their joint announcement, to make explicit.

A personal note. I was a wilderness canoeist before a 1996 collision with a moose on a Manitoba highway left me a C4 quadriplegic. The Seal River is not a place I will paddle myself. It is, however, a place I want my nieces and nephews, and the next generation of Manitoba paddlers, to be able to reach.

“Earn your way in,” I said in 2017, land at Lac Brochet outside the watershed and paddle in, under your own power. The opportunity is gone for me. It is not gone for them.

The public consultation closes June 2 at EngageMB.ca. The watershed is still there. The decision, finally, is Manitobans’.

Steven Fletcher, P.C., P. Eng., is a geological engineer, a former member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba for Assiniboia, and a former member of Parliament for Charleswood–St. James–Assiniboia.