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The trade claim is under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it comes from an American company called Windstream Energy.

Like Trillium Power, Windstream wanted to build a large array of windmills in Lake Ontario off Kingston. Windstream’s proposed site was just northeast of Trillium’s — if both had been built, they’d have been neighbours.

Like Trillium, Windstream alleges it was wronged by that 2011 decision, which scrapped every project then in development and froze applications for new ones, and deserves to be compensated.

But unlike Trillium, Windstream has an enormous amount of evidence, hundreds of pages’ worth, in the public record, filed with a tribunal in The Hague.

Those filings include extracts from numerous emails government officials sent each other, complaining about how frustrating it was to try to come up with scientific explanations for things the politicians had chosen to do for political reasons.

The emails were obtained by Windstream through access to information and during the course of document production as part of the legal proceedings.

For instance, in spring 2010, the government considered an “exclusion zone” that would have forced all windmills in the Great Lakes to be built at least five kilometres from shore. That would have pacified some people who just didn’t want to look at windmills out on the water, but according to Windstream’s evidence that wasn’t what the government wanted to say.