(June 7, 2001) The Three Gorges project stands as a black mark on Canada’s human rights record abroad, says Probe International’s Patricia Adams. ‘You have to be willing to walk away from a project if it violates your principles.’

(Excerpt)

… With so much at stake, few paused to ask what moral compromises would be necessary to turn a poverty-stricken backwater into the world’s next great industrial titan, in less than a decade. The massive Three Gorges Dam megaproject on the Yangtze River may stand as the most dramatic example of Western business aiding a quantum leap in China’s economic development, without much thought for the human toll. Several Canadian companies, including Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, Acres International, Hydro-Qu≈Ωbec and Dominion Bridge Inc., have been involved in various aspects of the Three Gorges endeavour, many of them backed by taxpayer money through Export Development Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency. But, as the project steamed ahead in the mid-1990s, and “Team Canada” trade missions trudged across the Chinese countryside promoting closer ties, few stopped to consider the forced evacuation of roughly two million people living in low-lying areas to be flooded by the dam. To this day, public criticism of the Three Gorges development is prohibited in China, and the project stands as a black mark on Canada’s human rights record abroad, says Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International, an environmental group based in Toronto. “Three Gorges Dam is a spectacular case because it’s so big and has been so notorious. But it’s just one of many, many projects, and I think it shows the difficulty of dealing with a dictatorship,” she says. “The principle should be, ‘do no harm.’ You have to be willing to walk away from a project if it violates your principles. China will change and it is changing, but when you’re dealing with a government that mistreats its citizens, it’s just as likely to mistreat companies as well.”

Macleans, June 7, 2001