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Silenced

It was found that the transboundary role of the IJC and the wider political scale of dispute mechanisms were handled differently in the two newspapers as well as compared to the planning

documents for the outlet. The WFP did discuss the IJC, often due to politicians making

statements that the dispute needed to be referenced to the IJC (Samyn, 2005, March 13). However, as discussed earlier, a majority of this IJC promotion took place after 2004 (though, few articles before then did discuss the need for the IJC to become involved, mostly at the urging of the then Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister; see Samyn, 1999, November 23). Before this period, the IJC remained a limited point of discussion for the federal governments, such as the 2002 offer from the U.S. Government to reference the Corps federal version of the outlet to the IJC discussed in the academic literature (Springer, 2007). Nonetheless, in the latter half of the

7; Samyn and Rabson 2005, June 21). However, unfortunately for pro-IJC Canadian interests, Whorely (2008, 630) notes that by 2005 when Manitoban and Canadian pressure to involve the IJC was more present in the news media, the positive relationship between the President Bush Administration and the North Dakota Government added obstacles to fostering the high level political cooperation needed to involved the IJC.

In contrast, the IJC was practically non-existent in DLJ coverage of the dispute,

appearing scarcely in 17 years of coverage analyzed for this thesis. Existing work on Devils Lake and the related Garrison dispute may provide insights as to the reasons for this lack of IJC

mention in the DLJ. Whorley (2008, 617) notes both that “[Garrison] has cast a long and

persistent shadow”, and “the defeat of [Garrison] has contributed to a weak transboundary relationship in the region due, in part, to diminished support for the International Joint

Commission and the Boundary Waters Treaty”, similar resentment was also noted by Springer (2007). It is therefore possible that a resentment of the IJC as a result of the previous decision on the Garrison dispute played a role in the omission of the transboundary scale of the dispute and

the discussion of resolution mechanisms on the DLJ.

It appears that the lack of IJC mention in the DLJ enforces Whorley’s (2008) suggestion

that a discourse of resentment towards the IJC existed, or exists, in North Dakota as a result of

history. The DLJ, by actively presenting an IJC-less narrative was out of step with both WFP

coverage and academic work produced during the dispute which unanimously mentions the commission (Rosenberg 2000; Knox 2004; Flanders 2006; Hollis 2007; Kempf 2007; Springer 2007; Paris 2007; Whorley 2008; Signorelli 2010). The effect of this on the dispute’s path might be evident in reviewing the NDSWC permit applications for the outlet. The permit applications are thorough documents and appear to have been written after an extensive amount of public consultation. Notably, the topics of discussion in the comment sections of the outlet permits

coincide with media discourses in the DLJ in that the questions and issues raised were also

much, or at least some, of their information on the outlet from the local newspaper. Perhaps related then, there are no comments about the IJC as a dispute mechanism in the NDSWC permit applications. The sole significant reference to the commission in any sense in the NDSWC permit applications is in the comment section of the 2003 applications, and is in regards to the standards established by the BWT, 1909 and not the use of the IJC as a dispute mechanism. Therefore, both forms of texts originating in the upstream area of the dispute (North Dakota) omit the narrative of IJC involvement present in downstream news media and academic discussions.

In their newspaper and policy analysis of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone, Howland et al. (2006, 218-23) indicated that the lack of regular presence or high rhetorical content in the news media removes an actor from a position of power in policy disputes, or indicates an existing lack of perceived power by other negotiating parties. As will be discussed again in the second section of this chapter, the ability for an actor to deliver narratives is central to ‘winning’ a policy dispute (Roe, 1989). In this case, it seems significant then that despite the presence if the IJC as the central character in academic literature regarding the dispute, and its presence in the news media downstream of the outlet, the IJC and its supporters were not given a voice to create their own arguments or narrative about the dispute in the DLJ. However, whether there is a causal connection between this lack of IJC discussion in the DLJ and the lack of IJC discussion in the outlet planning documents or the unwillingness for outlet proponents to submit the project for IJC referral would likely require further research.

In regards to the main research problem, this finding indicates that the news media

discourse, specifically the difference in discourse between DLJ and WFP in regards to the IJC

could have played a role in the lack of willingness for North Dakota to involve the IJC by withholding the narrative of IJC as an important character from the public discussion. This thesis agrees with the assertions that there was a discursive connection between Devils Lake and

Garrison. However, worth pointing out is the lack of Garrison narratives in the DLJ as compared

resentment about Garrison within some aspect of the North Dakota community. What this may mean for the Devils Lake dispute is that not only were Knox (2004), Springer (2007) and

Whorley (2008) correct that there is a tacit connection between past and present regional conflicts when they involve many of the same ideas, resources and people, but that it is further possible that understanding the comparative history between regions in conflict with one another is necessary in order to better understand environmental disputes.