A Teaser from Muskrat Falls: How a Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation
Muskrat Falls
edited by Stephen Crocker and Lisa Moore
Memorial University Press
How can it be that, after having spent almost $13 billion on energy security, the provincial government must now seek revenue from another source, or assistance from the federal government to subsidize electrical rates and protect citizens from the Frankenstein-like creation of its own Crown agency?
Considered on their own, the many distinct problems that have beleaguered the dam might each be attributed to local accidents of mismanagement, cost overrun, “optimism bias,” or even corruption and crime. But taken together, the logistics and means which brought Muskrat Falls to life fit the profile of an increasingly familiar kind of crisis, visible across Canada and around the world today, where public means of providing vital services and infrastructural security—that is, access to heat, water, food, energy, shelter—are changed into collateral for risky, speculative enterprises, with often disastrous results. The Chalillo Dam built in Belize by Newfoundland’s Fortis Inc., The Irish Water Corporation, the airport in Freetown Sierra Leone, the Site C Dam in British Columbia, and the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka are all recent projects that, like Muskrat Falls, promised to reinvigorate failing public infrastructure through new forms of investment finance. Instead, each has arguably diminished the public benefit of these utilities because, as with Muskrat Falls, the mechanisms and means that guarantee profit for global investment houses and international construction firms directly undermine long-term public health and the infrastructural security of citizens.
–Excerpted from “Introduction: How a Public Utility Became a Predatory Formation” by Stephen Crocker in Muskrat Falls: How a Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation, edited by Stephen Crocker and Lisa Moore. © Stephen Crocker. Published by Memorial University Press. memorialuniversitypress.ca
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