West-side hydro line 'ridiculous,' says Manitoba MP

A federal MP has come out swinging against Manitoba's plan to build a hydro transmission line down the west side of the province.

Conservative Steven Fletcher says building on the west side of Lake Manitoba— instead of the much shorter east side of Lake Winnipeg— will waste so much power it isenvironmentally indefensible and "ridiculous."

"It'd be like heating your home with the doors open in January," he said. "Nobody would do it because it's a waste."

The provincial NDP government is being hypocritical by telling Manitobans to save energy by switching, for example, the type of light bulb they use, when the longer west-side line will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in power alone, he said.

Fletcher said he has lobbied every Conservative cabinet minister— including the Prime Minister and Manitoba MP Vic Toews, who heads the Treasury Board— on the matter.

The issue threatens to spoil the goodwill between the federal and provincial governments, he said, and could have implications in what Manitoba receives in federal funding for other projects, such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights or the floodway expansion.

"Taxpayers from B.C.,Alberta and Ontario subsidize our quality of life in Manitoba dramatically, and if I were in those provinces, I wouldn't be happy if I heard that a province was unnecessarily spending hundreds of millions of dollars additionally on capital costs and foregoing billions of dollars in future revenue because of some ideological quirk," he said.

Fletcher hopes the provincial government changes its mind on the matter. In the meantime, he said, he will continue to lobby the federal Conservative cabinet about his concerns.

Provincial officials announced in September that Manitoba Hydro's third high-voltage, direct-current transmission line, called BiPole III, will run west of Lake Manitoba, rather than cutting a shorter route through pristine boreal forest on the east side of Lake Winnipeg.

The route down the western side of the province is longer and will cost hundreds of millions more to build, and it's estimated Manitoba Hydro will forfeit an additional hundreds of millions of dollars in power lost as the electricity makes the longer journey south.

However, environmentalists have applauded the provincial government's decision to go west, arguing that maintaining the forest is worth the cost. An east-side line could also affect a proposal to have a large area of land declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, say proponents of the west-side line.

The precise route for the $2-billion line will be determined after an environmental, design and public consultation process that is expected to take several years.

About three-quarters of Manitoba Hydro's electricity production is currently supplied through two transmission lines that run from Gillam to Winnipeg through the Interlake area, between the province's two large lakes.

Once complete in 2017, BiPole III will provide a backup to those lines and carry power from new planned generating stations to southern Manitoba.