NADJA: Between Midnight and the Rooster's Crow is a film that explores the oil industry of Ecuador, particularly in the Amazon, through a Canadian lens, because of a Canadian company that is a very large player in that growing industry. The film is told through my perspective as a Canadian and it tries to examine the ramifications, both the social and environmental impacts of oil activity in the Amazon and how it relates to the process of globalization and Western patterns of consumption.

INQ: How did you come to learn about EnCana and their activities in Ecuador?

NADJA: I had lived in Ecuador for a year and I was involved in working on oil issues through an indigenous federation. So I knew there was a Canadian company in the Amazon, though I wasn't any more familiar with that company than with any other one. Several years after I had returned to Canada, I learned that there was a change in ownership in those Ecuadorian operations and that the new owner, which was EnCana, was at the helm of a major new pipeline project that was causing massive controversy across the country. And I started getting these reports, these horrific stories of human rights violations that were happening and massive uprisings against this OCP pipeline. Knowing that it was a Canadian company that was leading the charge was one of the reasons that I wanted to become involved in working on [the story of] the pipeline.

INQ: When did you decide to do a documentary about it? From where did you get funding?

NADJA: I decided to do a documentary because I started running a campaign against EnCana, and as a part of that campaign, I knew that it was really important and necessary to raise public awareness about the issue. I mean, oil exploitation in the Amazon and the Canadian links to it were not on the public radar at all in Canada. So I thought, well, what better way to get the word out than to do a film. I had no idea when I started how difficult it would be to get enough funding to do it and how long the process would actually take. I got most of my funding through the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and some help from the National Film Board, the Canadian Auto Workers, as well as a few environmental organizations.

INQ: That's kind of surprising that the Canadian Auto Workers would sponsor a film about the negative effects of oil exploitation.

NADJA: Well, they have a social justice fund, and an international department, and so a lot of the dues from the members go to really great causes.

INQ: What has been the response to your documentary so far, from critics and non-critics?

NADJA: There's been a lot of response, which has been great. More than I expected. The media has done a very good job of picking it up and wanting to report on it. I think that the most impacting response for me has been from the general public. It appears to have impacted viewers in the sense that I think it's opened the eyes of many viewers who weren't aware that Canadians and our companies are very closely implicated in creating huge social, economic and environmental challenges for communities in the third world. I think it's come as a great shock to a lot of people, to see the actual connections between our consumption of oil and our companies. A lot of people have been moved by the stories of the characters in the film. I think they're taken by what are very brave and very courageous people that the film tries to focus on.
In terms of critics of the film, I haven't received much criticism. I imagine that the greatest criticism would come from EnCana itself, but I haven't had any formal interactions with them after the film came out except for when I screened the film at a festival in Vancouver and one of EnCana's representatives from Calgary showed up. He spoke to the audience afterwards and mentioned that he wanted audience members to keep in mind that there were actually a lot of supporters in Ecuador of EnCana who were able to recognize that the company was trying to do good in the country, and that it wasn't quite so one-sided.
My objective with this film was to show one side which did not have a voice. Although populations who were against the pipeline made their opinions known loud and clear and were able to attract a lot of national and international media, at the same time, reports coming to the company and to the shareholders were always positive, that construction was moving along and progress was planned, etc. I felt it was really important to show the other side of the story. It's a point of view documentary. It remains very true to my experience making this film. It originally started out as a very balanced type of piece, something more along the lines of what you'd see on a current affairs type of show, and I realized in the end that I wasn't being true to my experience as a film maker, and the stories that I was examining.

INQ: Did you ever feel physically threatened by the security personnel that followed you around?

NADJA: No. I think that unfortunately I was safer than Ecuadorians in the area because I'm Canadian and if anything were to have happened to me that would have been a huge scandal for EnCana. I did have a Canadian colleague who had a gun put to his head by an EnCana security guard once, when he was trying to take photographs outside of their operations. I think that EnCana's security force is definitely intimidating, but I think that they were also very aware of the fact that I was a Canadian traveling in the region, and perhaps it was a false sense of security that I gave myself, but I felt that as long as they knew that I was Canadian, that in a sense protected me somehow. The times when I was more worried was when we weren't as visible in the sense of when we would be in the jungle, when all the security people would be able to see was movement if they saw us and not who we were.

INQ: What are the Ecuadorian people able to do about oil exploitation in their country?

NADJA: Well, they've tried a lot of different methods. Ecuadorians are great at constructing roadblocks, shutting down oil transportation from one part of the country to another, and mounting national strikes. They have an amazing ability to organize on a mass scale, and they do so on a regular basis. As a result, they have managed to occupy and shut down oil wells, they've managed to shut down pipelines, and to basically shut down the transport of oil, which always has a massive economic impact on the government, and which often makes them come to the negotiating table. However, promises aren't always kept by the government, and rarely so, and so I think that there is understandably a feeling of fatigue amongst a lot of Amazonian populations that their problems aren't getting better, and no matter how many roadblocks or protests they mount, change hasn't come their way.

INQ: There's too much money involved.

NADJA: Too much money, and there's also a huge power imbalance. The Amazon is the least populated area in Ecuador and its mostly made up of indigenous peoples who are treated as second class citizens in Ecuador. Those factors combined with oil being the country's most important source of revenue, means that the Ecuadorian government isn't too keen on reducing the amount of oil that they pump out of the Amazon.

INQ: In the film, you state that the national pipeline in Ecuador has spilled more oil than the Exxon Valdez. Why haven't we heard about it?

NADJA: I think the reason is because it's happened over a period of three decades. And so, it wasn't one, massive, dramatic spill that happened. It's been an accumulation of several, and frequent, spills. It's kind of like we don't hear about people who die of poverty and preventable disease every single day, but we hear about a massive number of people dying in the tsunami last year for example.

INQ: EnCana has won many honours recently, including a Social Responsibility Recognition award from The Globe And Mail. They've also won awards from Canadian and Ecuadorian governments. Do they deserve these awards?

NADJA: I can only speak for their Ecuadorian operations and I would say no. I think that in Ecuador they are recognized as a company that is better than most of the other companies that are operating there, but unfortunately that's not a comparison that a company should be proud of, because the bar has been set extraordinarily low in Ecuador and companies can get away with wide scale violations of environmental regulations and human rights violations. So I think that in Ecuador, no, they don't deserve that. I'm not terribly familiar with their operations in Canada and the States, but I am in touch with several people who are, and they are a frequent violator of regulations. For example, I believe it was in Colorado last year, there was a sour gas leak, and citizens of this town discovered it because there were bubbles coming up in the river, right by their homes. EnCana still has not claimed responsibility for that. EnCana before its merger, its predecessor was the Alberta Energy Company which is the company that was involved with the whole Weibo Ludwig scandal in Alberta several years ago, where they collaborated with the RCMP to basically frame saboteurs. I think that EnCana does a good job in terms of its branding and puts a lot of work into their public image, precisely because it's so important that they are accepted in communities because they have a huge presence in Western Canada and the U.S. Rockies. Sometimes, unfortunately, we get fooled by brands and images.

INQ: Are you an EnCana shareholder? If not, how were you able to get in and ask questions at their shareholders' meeting?

NADJA: I'm not a shareholder, but I was in touch with shareholders who gave me their proxies so I could go and represent them.

INQ: Gwyn Morgan was replaced by Randy Eresman as CEO of EnCana at 2005's year-end. Will this mean any change in EnCana's business practices?

NADJA: I have no idea. I think that Gwyn Morgan is a very strong character, and is very determined, and is perhaps not very easily influenced by others, so I'm not sure if EnCana's new CEO will be. It's hard to speculate on something like that. Gwyn Morgan was a very aggressive CEO, and it's hard to know how much of EnCana's success was credited to his aggressive style or business strategy.

INQ: Do you know why he was replaced? Or did he just move on?

NADJA: In the media it has come out that it's his personal choice to retire. I have the sense that perhaps his particular style, and the often individual way in which he governed the company might not have been well received at times. But, then again, you have to consider that he created an incredibly successful company from one which was very small.

INQ: OCP, the company building the new pipeline in Ecuador, has EnCana as its largest investor. The other investors are Repsol-YPF, Occidental, Petrobas and Perenco. What do you know about the business practices of these other companies?

NADJA: Occidental has an abhorrent record in Ecuador. They're an American company based in L.A. and they have oil producing operations in Ecuador, as does Repsol. Repsol is a Spanish company, and their oil concession block is actually inside the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Most of these companies have the reputation of very patriarchal relationships with indigenous people, where minor handouts are given in order to be accepted into communities, which has resulted in a lot of social problems. Many of these companies also have a reputation for having very insidious methods of entering into communities and the public relations exercises, that remain exercises unfortunately, and that don't actually reflect good intentions. I'm not sure about the reputation of Perenco or Petrobas.

INQ: What kinds of things have happened to people who resisted having OCP's pipeline cross their lands?

NADJA: Some people accepted compensation in the end, because they felt that there was no other way to gain anything from this. They felt that they weren't going to be able to stop the pipeline from traversing their property, and they decided that they'd try to at least get something out of it. So in the end some were compensated. There were huge discrepancies in the amounts of money that people were paid. Some people got ridiculously low amounts of money, while other, often more powerful land owners, were able to negotiate for higher prices. Other peasants were assaulted by the police that OCP had hired to protect the pipeline. Many who resisted the pipeline were arrested and jailed. Many to this day have never received a penny.

INQ: Are there any members of the Ecuadorian government fighting the activities of oil exploiting companies that operate in Ecuador?

NADJA: There have been a lot of changes in the Ecuadorian government, and the former Ecuadorian President, Lucio Gutiérrez, who was elected based on a very populist platform, and a pro-indigenous platform, created really high hopes for people that he would represent indigenous peoples' concerns. And so, Amazonian populations actually had high hopes for him because he claimed that he would stand up against the IMF, the World Bank, etc, and he turned out to do the exact opposite. He had several ministers who were Indian, and in terms of politicians who actually spoke out against oil companies, that tends to happen at the regional or municipal level. There are politicians at the provincial level who will speak out against companies, but there are not that many allies at the national level. There are, of course, within the Ministry of Environment, but the power of that ministry compared to the Ministry of Energy and Mines is very little. So unfortunately, usually allies within government don't tend to be able to actually exert that much influence.

INQ: Are there any Canadian politicians concerned about EnCana's activities?

NADJA: I don't know.

INQ: How much responsibility does the average Canadian bear for what's happening in Ecuador?

NADJA: I think it's hard to be able to quantify that, but, I think that we have a personal responsibility regarding our consumption of oil. Not necessarily related to Ecuador, but oil exploitation has consequences in the places where it's both extracted as well as where it's consumed. So I think there's definitely a degree of personal responsibility there, and I think that if shareholders of oil companies that are involved in egregious activities, we also bear responsibility. Anybody really that has any funds in the Canadian Pension Plan, for example, that invests in very problematic companies, such as EnCana, is implicated to a degree, and I think that we forget that all of those dollars really add up in the big picture. And then, of course, as a country, we have the responsibility to ensure that Canadian companies are not carrying out activities that are in violation of environmental law, of human rights law, etc, that tarnish the Canadian reputation. I think that we have a responsibility to regulate our companies, and especially to ensure that at the very least, they are held to the same types of standards abroad as they are here in Canada. So I think that we're responsible on various levels.

INQ: What can we do, as consumers of oil, to help the people of Ecuador?

NADJA: I think that we can take action from a personal to a broader level. First of all, we can watch our own consumption of oil and try to live our lives in such a way that reduces the amount of oil that we consume, and that we also support and take part in using alternative energy sources, and telling our politicians that we support it and trying to push for greater subsidies and research of alternative energy. I think that we can also directly support the people of Ecuador by getting in touch with organizations in Ecuador, or Canadian organizations who work with Ecuadorian ones and supporting them by volunteering or donating funds. The struggle of Ecuadorians often requires resources. And then I think that we need to be talking to our politicians about specific cases of Canadian involvement in Ecuador. But also, it's going to take forever if we try to go after one company after another. This is a systemic problem. I think that what we need to be doing is pushing for legal means to regulate Canadian companies overseas. Not just oil companies, but mining companies, gas companies, etc. We need to be conscientious of where our money is going and where our companies are going.
There's yet another case of a Canadian company in Ecuador right now. They're a mining company called Ascendant and the local communities have been so frustrated in not having their issues addressed that they've recently set fire to the company's operations because they have been receiving death threats, their community had to experience the presence of company security guards for a very prolonged period of time that intimidated the local population. The company set up a community organization with the sole purpose of dividing the community, and propping up certain politicians. And that's going on right now.
One other thing that I wanted to mention in terms of what people can do to support the people of Ecuador. As investors, we can become more conscientious. We can invest our funds in social, environmental, or ethical funds, and by doing so, you often have more of a voice as a shareholder. Those types of funds and companies are more prone to actually engage with companies in dialog to try to remedy some of these issues. That's a natural route for shareholder activism. There are various options; you can invest your money in the stocks of a specific company, but if you choose to invest in a fund, there are greater controls in social and environmental funds to screen out certain types of companies. That's not to say that all problematic companies aren't in those funds. For example, Ethical Funds had $30 million worth of shares in EnCana, and many investors in Ethical Funds wrote in and said that they had a real problem with that. Ethical Funds started talking to EnCana about the problems and engaging in dialog with the company to try to address some of those issues. That's one route. Another route is to actually dis-invest from a company. As an individual shareholder you're not going to get noticed unless you're a billionaire. Any time that we go to the bank to get our annual RRSPs, you can ask the bank manager "Do you have social and environmental funds? Do you invest in this company? Why are you investing in this company?" And eventually, if they get even a couple of complaints at one branch, that becomes known.

INQ: That's really interesting, thank you.

NADJA: No problem.

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Right after the interview, Nadja hurried off to a local candidates' debate for the upcoming Canadian Federal election, because she had some questions for the candidates. Nadja doesn't seem to give her activism much of a rest, but the world will be a better place for her effort.
CBC's Country Canada channel is airing Between Midnight and the Rooster's Crow starting Jan. 18, 2006. Check your local listings so you don't miss it!
Interviewed Jan. 12, 2006, by Victor Couwenbergh.

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