MONTREAL — Hydro-Québec’s latest gambit to turn Quebec into a carbon-neutral power source for a chunk of the continent is a reminder that the public utility is as much a symbol of green pride for the province as it is a producer of power. While much of the planet burns coal, futzes about with expensive nuclear power or shivers in the dark because the wind stopped blowing—hello, Europe!—the gigawatts its dams churn out are reliable and clean.

Weird, then, to see a brand so cherished at home described abroad as part of a dark-money cabal bent on deceiving the good people of Maine and desecrating a pristine bit of the state’s western forests.

But there you have it, in newspapers and Facebook ads and doorstep handouts. Even Tucker Carlson weighed in on Hydro-Québec’s “green-energy scam,” if only because the story constitutes a Tucker trifecta: a foreign-owned company, what he claims is the folly of renewable energy and another chance for him to cosplay as an L.L. Bean-styled woodsman.

At issue is the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) project, which will see a new power line cross 233 kilometres to further connect Quebec to the American states directly below it. Its construction is part of a deal to deliver 9.45 terawatt hours per year to Massachusetts for 20 years beginning in 2023, which will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Hydro-Québec. The project, which saw the utility partner with a subsidiary of Avangrid, itself the American subsidiary of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, is a critical part of the plan to turn the province into what Quebec Premier François Legault called “the battery of the Northeast.”

About 75 per cent of the route is already cleared and 100 poles have so far been installed, though that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a chance the whole thing will be stopped in its tracks. That’s because in February, with the project well underway, opponents secured enough signatures to trigger a statewide referendum, to be held Tuesday. As a result, Hydro-Québec has found itself in an American-style political fight, complete with outsized campaign budgets, attack ads and certain liberties with the truth.

In early March, Hydro-Québec’s American subsidiary signed a contract with blue-chip D.C. lobbying firm Forbes Tate Partners for a “Maine information-sharing effort” in which the firm’s “local field team [would] work with Maine citizens and organizations to assist them in expressing their support for the Clean Energy Corridor.”

All told, groups in favour of the project spent nearly US$22 million in referendum-related activities alone, according to the Maine Ethics Commission—outspending those opposed, which spent about US$17.7 million. “It is by far the most expensive campaign that we’ve ever had to go through,” Hydro-Québec governmental affairs director Serge Abergel, who signed the Forbes Tate deal, told me recently.

I obtained one fragrant bit of pro-project agitprop from the pro-corridor campaign last week, in the form of a letter sent to Maine voters claiming the ballot question “empowers politicians and out-of-staters with a new set of tools that can be used to target gun owners.” It might otherwise be mistaken for a homespun bit of prose, save for the line “Paid for by Mainers for Fair Laws”—a “ballot question committee” bankrolled to the tune of US$13.4 million, in part by … the Hydro-Québec partner’s parent company (and noted out-of-stater) Avangrid.

Tactics like these have the project’s opponents bristling. “Hydro-Québec is a foreign-government-owned corporation that is meddling with Maine voters at an unprecedented level,” Pete Didisheim, the advocacy senior director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), told me.

But dark money isn’t limited by borders or ideological divides.

Consider the case of Mainers for Local Power, one of the groups shoveling money into the ballot box’s maw. Despite its folksy-sounding name, it is in fact a political-action committee (PAC), an entity that exists solely to fund pushes for or against political candidates or ballot initiatives. Registered in 2019, this PAC’s top donors are Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, Texas-based Calpine and Dallas-based Vistra. NextEra, one of the biggest energy companies in the U.S, has alone dumped just over US$20 million in the fight against New Clean Energy Connect.

NextEra sells itself as a clean-power company, and its portfolio is indeed impressive. Yet a closer look at its Maine holdings reveals a rather large dinosaur in the form of Wyman Unit No. 4. It is Maine’s largest power-generating source, primarily used to meet peak energy demand in the winter, and it generates its 846 megawatts by burning residual oil, recognized as one of the dirtiest fuel sources this side of coal.

This likely isn’t NextEra’s first tussle with Hydro-Québec. In 2017, William Tucker from the New Hampshire website Miscellany Blue made a fairly compelling case that the company was behind a group opposed to the Northern Pass, a proposed 308-kilometre line that would have carried 1,090 megawatts of Hydro-Québec power to Massachusetts—generating up to $500 million in annual revenues for the provincial utility—had regulators in New Hampshire, through which the line passed, not rejected it in 2018. In Maine’s case, there are whispers that NextEra is behind anti-NECEC group Stop the Corridor. (NextEra president John Ketchum declined an interview request. A NextEra spokesperson didn’t respond to my question about Stop the Corridor, and neither Calpine nor Vistra responded to me at all.)

Some of that alleged dark money even found its way to the coffers of the NRCM, whose environmental bonafides in Maine date back more than 60 years. In 2019, the NRCM accepted a donation from a group called “Clean Energy for ME LLC,” also known as Stop the Corridor. When I asked Didisheim about it, he said he couldn’t remember how much the donation was for, only that it was more than $1,000.

“We made clear that that we have very strict conflict-of-interest policies, and we were assured that the funding source was from an entity that strongly supports our mission and is consistent with our policies,” he told me, adding that “not a penny” of the anti-NECEC donations came from fossil-fuel companies. He also said Hydro-Québec will inevitably resort to burning natural gas to supply Massachusetts, because he doesn’t believe the utility has the reserves to meet the demand. (Fact check: Hydro-Québec, which operates 668 hydroelectric dams, has actually paid the owner of the province’s sole natural gas-fired facility to not produce electricity.)

It’s difficult, amid this mud- and money-slinging exercise, to be anything less than cynical. I’ve been critical of Hydro-Québec before, particularly in how the public utility bigfoots competitors in its own backyard, exactly as you’d expect a monopoly to act—and to the great detriment of smaller Quebec companies.

But NextEra is on another level. Put it this way: Hydro-Québec wants to make billions of dollars selling its power to Americans—power made from rushing water. NextEra et al. want to continue making billions of dollars selling electricity to Americans by way of renewables, yes, but also natural gas and oil. Only one of these is truly tenable in and for the future.

And so on Tuesday, the state votes. Didisheim said he’d “be kind of surprised” if he and his fellow opponents to the project lost, while Hydro-Québec’s Abergel said the utility’s internal polling suggests the two sides are neck-and-neck. A recent poll of Mainers from Portland-based Critical Insights splits the difference, suggesting 49 per cent support stopping construction, 36 per cent want it to go ahead and 15 per cent are unsure or unwilling to say.

Yet, New Clean Energy Connect isn’t necessarily toast if Hydro-Québec is on the losing end Tuesday. Should that happen, Abergel told me, the fight will simply move to the courtroom.