Activists have long claimed that building infrastructure in Canada inevitably comes with a tithe of victimized Indigenous women

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According to NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis, the chief problem with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pledge to prioritize “nation building projects” is that they will be a conduit for murder and sexual assault on a grand scale.

On stage at the NDP’s French language leaders’ debate last week, Lewis referred to the various “major projects” being sought by the Carney government as “big, manly things with huge work camps entailed in remote areas.”

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“The impacts on Indigenous women and girls are intense, are horrifying,” said Lewis during an English portion of the debate.

While Lewis may be one of the first on a national stage to cast pipelines and hydroelectric dams as instruments of terror, it’s an idea that’s become common among the activist circles that Lewis inhabits.

And this is despite the fact that the data supporting such a claim is not tremendously strong.

Since at least 2017, anti-pipeline advocates in particular have often argued that the mere act of building infrastructure in Canada inevitably comes with a tithe of murder and rape.

In 2020, opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline sought court orders to halt the project on the grounds that it would yield “man camps” of dangerous workers in Northern B.C. “This legal challenge comes at a time when Canadians at large are increasingly concerned about the growing epidemic of violence against........

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