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“Trans Mountain will gather information about Indigenous social experiences during construction, including those relating to worker accommodation, worker conduct, as well as Indigenous social and cultural well-being,” Hounsell said.

Photo by Gerry Kahrmann / PNG

Indigenous advocate Connie Greyeyes said she is not against pipelines and knows many honourable resource workers where she lives in Fort St. John, the home of several big projects.

But she has also “had so many interactions with women who are assaulted by people who they didn’t know, who were here as workers.” This could be curtailed, she argued, if industry, government and communities provided more resources to vulnerable women.

“While I understand that progress happens, there has to be solutions to lessen the impacts on women and girls,” Greyeyes said. “This was never an attack on people or an industry, but it’s about raising awareness that there are things that need to change. We need to make sure that communities are protected.”

Greyeyes worked with Amnesty International to investigate abuses against Indigenous women and girls in Manitoba after construction began on a large hydroelectric dam in 2014. The MMIWG report supports calls for a public inquiry into alleged “sexual violence and racism” during that project.

She also contributed to the 2016 Amnesty report Out of Sight, Out of Mind about the safety of Indigenous women in northeast B.C., where there are many large hydroelectric, oil, gas and pipeline projects. This report, Greyeyes testified at the MMIWG inquiry, concluded some workers come into local towns after many days of labour in remote locations looking to “blow off steam” in places where they are largely anonymous.