Page explains that environmental racism is “essentially the disproportionate amount of landfills and industrial pollution sites next to Indigenous and Black communities,” a pattern that she says is very clear, not just in Nova Scotia but in Canada as a whole.

From her home in New York, she next spoke to the grassroots Mi’kmaw grandmothers who have been trying to protect the water of the #Shubenacadie River from the Alton Gas project.

Calgary-based AltaGas plans to hollow out massive salt caverns about a kilometre underground for storing natural gas near the community of Stewiake, about 70 kilometres northeast of Halifax. To do that, the company intends to remove the salt by dissolving it with water from the Shubenacadie River and then dumping the brine back into the 72-kilometre-long tidal river, which empties into the the Bay of Fundy.

The Mi’kmaw water protectors and their allies want the project stopped because of the risk the brine, a deleterious substance, poses to fish in the river, something acknowledged by federal scientists in documents obtained by water protectors Dale Poulette and Rachael Greenland-Smith under a freedom of information request.

It was after she spoke with the grandmothers that Page realized Alton Gas looked like another case of environmental racism in the making.