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Climate Change

Listen up: A First Nations message for the oil patch

JEFFREY JONES
CALGARY — The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Dec. 04 2013, 6:13 PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Dec. 04 2013, 6:30 PM EST

At a business conference in the Alberta Rockies last week, some of Canada’s heaviest hitters in energy offered their renditions of essentially the same tune.

Market access was the topic, and the consensus among the premiers of Alberta and New Brunswick as well as bosses at the largest pipeline and oil companies was that we as a nation should have it.

That means oil flowing to where it will fetch its highest price, whether that means the coasts of the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico or Pacific. The result: jobs and a stronger economy across the country.

A key reason for snags, they agreed, is opponents have swayed some of the public against their well-backed-up assertions that the oil sands are being developed responsibly, and the industry is bringing all available technology to bear in cutting carbon emissions and transporting the stuff safely.

Then Miles Richardson stood up and abruptly changed the tune with the most important reminder of the day – that any road to riches in Asia for the energy sector passes through numerous First Nations territories, and major long-standing problems need to be solved first. Mr. Richardson knows whereof he speaks. A former president of the Haida Nation on the B.C. coast and a former chief commissioner of the B.C. Treaty Commission, he talks passionately about his people’s ancient connection to the land and how the relationship between B.C. native groups and Ottawa is broken.

Many in the oil patch see native resistance to projects as a soft obstacle to overcome. It’s anything but. It’s a legal problem that could push back by years the Alberta-based industry’s bid for market access, something that has already caused much friction with aboriginals.

So, Mr. Richardson said: Listen up.

Canada has dragged its feet for decades as natives on the coast sought treaties to spell out their relationship with the rest of the country. The absence of settled claims actually gives First Nations rights and title to all aspects of traditional lands, courts have ruled.
His point is that failure to reach deals only makes life messier for companies as they fear economic windows closing before multibillion-dollar projects can get built.

“If there isn’t an agreement with government, First Nations are going to have a view on whether a proposal ought to proceed and, if so, they’ll lay out terms on how it can proceed,” he said in an interview. “If agreement can be reached, great. If it can’t, nothing’s going to proceed.”

Of course, the constitution requires that aboriginal people be consulted on resources projects, something that federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has acknowledged often. There’s no widespread agreement, though, on what constitutes consultation: Does it mean informing communities or getting support?

Mr. Richardson contends that First Nations have nothing less than veto power.

“I’d make the case that First Nation jurisdiction is every bit as good as the Crown’s. That’s why we need to negotiate treaties and reconcile them so all of society has the same rules,” he said. “In the absence of treaties, which sort these issues out, groups like industry are caught in the middle and are going have to deal with both parties.” So where does this leave the oil patch, as it seeks to get oil and gas to the coast on proposed pipelines such as Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway?

Late to the party, for one thing. Northern Gateway, facing a regulatory decision this month, has been in the works since the start of the last decade, though the B.C. treaty process has plodded along for much longer. Some native leaders have already promised court battles if pipelines are approved.

This week, Doug Eyford, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s special envoy to West Coast First Nations, is due to release a report on strategies for getting aboriginal people to support development projects and share in benefits.

Mr. Richardson said the industry would do well in that regard to back First Nations in their quests for treaties, as opposed to viewing them as hurdles that need to be cleared to proceed with pipelines. “That’s their call, if they want to start over. But the path they’re on is the path to one of the biggest battles we’re going to see in this country, as far as I can see.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/listen-up-a-first-nations-message-for-the-oil-patch/article15772976/

t a business conference in the Alberta Rockies last week, some of Canada’s heaviest hitters in energy offered their renditions of essentially the same tune. Market access was the topic, and the consensus among the premiers of Alberta and New Brunswick as well as bosses at the largest pipeline and oil companies was that we as a nation should have it. That means oil flowing to where it will fetch its highest price, whether that means the coasts of the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico or Pacific. The result: jobs and a stronger economy across the country. A key reason for snags, they agreed, is opponents have swayed some of the public against their well-backed-up assertions that the oil sands are being developed responsibly, and the industry is bringing all available technology to bear in cutting carbon emissions and transporting the stuff safely.

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Group sues over Harper limits on pipeline hearings

BY PETER O'NEIL, VANCOUVER SUN AUGUST 13, 2013

OTTAWA — A Vancouver-based environmental group is challenging the federal government’s limits on participation in hearings for projects such as Kinder Morgan’s proposed pipeline to ship bitumen crude from Alberta to British Columbia.

ForestEthics Advocacy, represented by prominent lawyer Clayton Ruby, filed an action in the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto on Tuesday seeking to have 2012 legislation limiting who can participate in hearings struck down as unconstitutional.

The claim targets changes to the National Energy Board Act that limit participants to those who are “directly affected” by a project or have “relevant information or expertise.”
ForestEthics is also challenging a nine-page NEB form that prospective interveners must fill out that says broader environmental issues related to pipelines, including climate change, won’t be considered by the regulator.

Both the law and the form violate free speech provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, according to the ForestEthics court submission.
The lawsuit directly relates to Calgary-based Enbridge Inc.’s application to reverse the flow of an existing line in Central Canada, but B.C. environmentalist Tzeporah Berman said the NEB policy applies to future hearings, such as those for the Kinder Morgan project.

She warned that the changes could cut the number of participants in future hearings by 90 per cent.

“It’s McCarthyesque,” said Berman, a member of ForestEthics Advocacy’s board. “Why are we as taxpayers paying for this as a public process if we’re not allowed to voice our concerns within that process? It’s not fair, it’s not objective.”

But Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said the legislation was necessary to stop environmental groups like Berman’s from abusing the system to stall projects with a flood of public interventions.

“Focusing submissions ensures the review is informed by the facts material to the scope of the hearing and protects it from being used as a tool to delay decisions,” he said in a statement.

Kinder Morgan plans to file its application to the NEB later this year, seeking permission to twin its existing pipeline to Burnaby, B.C., at a cost of $5.4 billion. If approved, the company projects the pipeline will triple capacity to almost 900,000 barrels a day starting in 2017.

“This is hugely relevant to the Kinder Morgan pipeline,” she said.

Berman bases her warning about Kinder Morgan’s project on a comparison between two Enbridge Inc. endeavours — its proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat, B.C., and its bid to reverse the flow of a 639-kilometre stretch of pipeline from North Westover, Ont., to Montreal.

Berman said 4,455 people made submissions to the Northern Gateway review panel, which operated under the old rules. That included 1,544 who provided oral submissions. (The NEB was unable to confirm those figures Tuesday.)

By contrast, only 60 got intervener status to appear at the hearings for the Ontario-Quebec project. Another 110 were allowed to submit letters of comment, according to the NEB.
The plaintiff in the ForestEthics case, Donna Sinclair of North Bay, Ont., was one of eight applicants who was told she didn’t have expertise and couldn’t prove the Ontario-Quebec pipeline affected her. Sinclair, according to Berman, wrote on her application that she wanted to raise climate-change concerns.

Other applicants, such as Sierra Club Canada and the Council of Canadians, were denied intervener status but were told they could submit letters.

The federal government’s 2012 changes to the NEB act were preceded with complaints that environmentalists had “hijacked” the Northern Gateway process.
Oliver said Tuesday the Northern Gateway experience proves changes were necessary to avoid bogging down costly public review processes. He said more than 95 per cent of aspiring interveners in Enbridge’s pipeline reversal proposal were allowed to make submissions.

While many of Northern Gateway’s political opponents dismiss the federal review panel as biased in favour of Enbridge, Berman confirmed that the panel process was politically useful for the environmental movement.

“The increased public debate that we had as a result of the Northern Gateway process being open to the public perhaps contributed to the fact that many people now believe that pipeline is now dead.”

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

OTTAWA — A Vancouver-based environmental group is challenging the federal government’s limits on participation in hearings for projects such as Kinder Morgan’s proposed pipeline to ship bitumen crude from Alberta to British Columbia.  ForestEthics Advocacy, represented by prominent lawyer Clayton Ruby, filed an action in the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto on Tuesday seeking to have 2012 legislation limiting who can participate in hearings struck down as unconstitutional.

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CSTC Unity on Pipelines

May 27, 2013
                                   
CSTC Unity on Pipelines

PDF Version

Dakelh Territory, Prince George, British Columbia.  Canada. It’s time that Premier Christy Clark meet with the CSTC Chiefs to discuss natural gas pipeline proposals impacting CSTC member First Nations territories.  The CSTC First Nations are unified and adamant that these natural gas pipeline projects will have a challenges ahead without our free, prior and informed consent.

Tribal Chief Terry Teegee stated, “We have been meeting with our leaders, and are unified in our approach to understand the cumulative impacts from all these proposed natural gas pipelines.”  Teegee continued, “We’ve also been meeting with the natural gas pipeline companies. Some have been better than others, but all must provide sufficient time and resources for our people to review these projects.”

“We are not against development, however we need to have sufficient time to conduct our studies and inform our membership,” said Chief Fred Sam of the Nak'azdli First Nation, which could be impacted by several natural gas pipelines being proposed, and the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.  The natural gas pipelines include: Pacific Trails Pipelines (Chevron/Apache), Coastal GasLink Pipeline (TransCanada), Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Project (TransCanada), and Northern Gas Transmission Project (Spectra). 

Dolly Abraham, Chief of Takla Lake First Nation and CSTC Vice-Tribal Chief warned: “The media is misleading everyone suggesting that Enbridge Northern Gateway has a chance of being built under Christy Clark’s leadership.  We have already done an assessment and have found that it is not worth the risk.”  Chief Dolly added, “We are united.  We have had a lot of broken promises from the Crown and industry, and we must be meaningfully consulted and accommodated.”

Chief Martin Louie of the Nadleh Whut'en First Nation said, “We have recently met with Doug Eyford, Special Envoy to Prime Minister Harper.  We let him know our collective views on the energy corridors for oil and natural gas pipeline infrastructure.  The federal government has a lot of work to do with our Nations to ensure that there is equitable revenue sharing and shared decision-making on these major projects.” 

“We are being pressured by various projects, including natural gas pipelines.  Deals are being made on the coast and upstream in northeast BC.  We are in the middle and will require new precedents and processes if these projects are to be viable”, said Chief Reg Louis of the Stellat'en First Nation.  He further stated, “We are very interested in hearing from the new BC government on their views on how BC will change its policies on revenue sharing, and shared decision-making with our First Nations.”

“Tl’azt’en Nation stands with our brothers and sisters to the north, south, east, and west on a unified front.  Industry and the Crown must engage our First Nations prior to any permits being issued.”  He added, “We don’t want to be forced into an either or scenario.  Our land and waterways are under threat, and we must have cumulative impact assessments completed in order to understand how these projects will impact future generations.”

Chief Stanley Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation said, “The Crown has been negligent and absent in meaningful discussions with our people.  The land question has not been resolved in our territories.”  He added, “Christy Clark must improve the BC government’s approach in dealing with our people.”

Tribal Chief Teegee concluded, “It’s premature for the Crown and natural gas pipeline companies to think that all these projects will happen without our consent or meaningful involvement.  Our First Nations have decision-making authority.  We will not be pushed aside, nor will our decision-making authority be fettered by divide-and-conquer tactics.  Our people and leaders are united.”

Some of the current natural gas pipeline proposals include:
• TransCanada – Coastal GasLink Project, runs near existing png pipeline ($4B)
• TransCanada – Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Project, runs north of Takla Lake ($5B)
• Apache/Chevron – Pacific Trails Pipeline, similar route as Coastal GasLink Project ($1.5B)
• Spectra Energy – runs north of Takla Lake, similar route as Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Project ($8B)

– 30 –
              
Media contacts: Tribal Chief Terry Teegee:  Office (250) 562-6279.  Cell: (250) 640-3256

Dakelh Territory, Prince George, British Columbia.  Canada. It’s time that Premier Christy Clark meet with the CSTC Chiefs to discuss natural gas pipeline proposals impacting CSTC member First Nations territories.  The CSTC First Nations are unified and adamant that these natural gas pipeline projects will have a challenges ahead without our free, prior and informed consent.

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Yinka Dene Alliance: Time for Enbridge to give up on Northern Gateway

Yinka Dene Alliance: Time for Enbridge to give up on Northern Gateway

BY MARTIN LOUIE, FRED SAM, DOLLY ABRAHAM, STANLEY THOMAS, KAREN OGEN AND RALPH PIERRE, CALGARY HERALD 

MAY 8, 2013

 

 

Yinka Dene Alliance: Time for Enbridge to give up on Northern Gateway

 

Chief Ta'Kaiya Blaney, from Sliammon B.C. and members of the Yinka Dene Alliance arrive after marching from the Legislature to the Enbridge Building to protest against the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in Edmonton on Wednesday, May 2, 2012.

Photograph by: John Lucas , edmontonjournal.com

 

Today, May 8, the Enbridge board of directors is meeting with shareholders in Calgary for the Enbridge annual general meeting. In the past, we, the chiefs of the Yinka Dene Alliance, have personally attended this meeting to explain to Enbridge senior management and shareholders why our communities have rejected the Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project. We have decided not to be with you this time, but our message today, as always, is that this and any other oil pipeline will not cross our homelands in British Columbia.

With the Yinka Dene peoples in the lead, First Nations voices of opposition are joined with those of oilsands workers, local governments, and citizens of every walk of life — from economists to environmentalists — across the country. We all know that this project will not be completed.

We, the Yinka Dene peoples, are standing up to protect the land for our children and the children of everyone in British Columbia. We have repeatedly said that your company and the provincial and federal governments are not prepared for the devastating effects of an oil spill on our lands and waters if the Northern Gateway project were to be built. During March and April, in addition to the high-profile spill in Mayflower, Ark., there have been at least nine other spills from ruptured oil and gas pipelines in North America, three of them in Canada. Contaminated water from tarsands processing was also discharged into the Athabasca River, which supplies the drinking water of our relations, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

Our lands are precious to us. We will rely on our constitutionally protected title and rights and on our own laws to protect our lands from desecration. That means that the legal impediments you face in getting this project approved are potentially insurmountable. More than 160 First Nations have signed the Save the Fraser Declaration and are standing together with us to say no to the Northern Gateway project, based on our indigenous laws. We are the wall through which the Northern Gateway pipeline will not pass.

The people of British Columbia and Canada have stood shoulder to shoulder with us to support us in our struggle. More than 100,000 people across Canada have signed petitions that recognize our decision to ban this project from our territories. B.C. mayors have stood on stage with us to condemn the Enbridge project as one that puts too much of our common future at risk. The Union of B.C. Municipalities has called on the provincial government to use everything within its powers to prevent the transport of bitumen through our lands and waters.

We have met with provincial and federal politicians who oppose this project, sharing our concerns about the peril that exporting more bitumen presents for Canada’s economy, local ecosystems, our greenhouse gas emissions targets, and the health of communities stretching from Alberta’s oilsands to B.C.’s coast and beyond. The fate of pipelines to the West Coast has become a defining issue in the upcoming B.C. election.

Your project has been called a “dead pipeline walking” by industry analysts. Business journals across this continent have described the bungling way in which you have dealt with First Nations and the lack of “social license” for this project. They have already concluded that, regardless of the recommendation made by the joint review panel or the decision of federal cabinet, this project will not see the light of day.

It’s time for Enbridge as a corporation to have a frank conversation with its shareholders: the Northern Gateway pipeline is a project without a future. Now is the time to come up with an exit strategy, one that works for First Nations, the people of B.C. and your shareholders. Rest assured that when you make the announcement that you have decided not to proceed, we will be the first to congratulate you on your sound judgment and business acumen. We will be happy to acknowledge that you have made the right choice, the responsible choice.

And until then, we and our supporters will continue to say what we have said since this project was announced. The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline will not be built across our lands or through our waters.

Snachailya, Mussi cho’ (Thank you very much, you have done us a great favour.)

 

Chiefs of the Yinka Dene Alliance: Chief Martin Louie, Nadleh Whut’en First Nation; Chief Fred Sam, Nakazdli First Nation; Chief Dolly Abraham, Takla Lake First Nation; Chief Stanley Thomas, Saik’uz First Nation; Chief Karen Ogen, Wet’suwet’en First Nation; Chief Ralph Pierre, Tl’azt’en First Nation. The Yinka Dene Alliance includes Nadleh Whut’en, Nak’azdli, Takla Lake, Saik’uz, Wet’suwet’en and Tl’azt’en First Nations in northern B.C. that have banned the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline from their territories as a matter of indigenous law.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald   

Read more:http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Yinka+Dene+Alliance+Time+Enbridge+give+Northern+Gateway/8350564/story.html#ixzz2SqLaVwn1

Today, May 8, the Enbridge board of directors is meeting with shareholders in Calgary for the Enbridge annual general meeting. In the past, we, the chiefs of the Yinka Dene Alliance, have personally attended this meeting to explain to Enbridge senior management and shareholders why our communities have rejected the Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project. We have decided not to be with you this time, but our message today, as always, is that this and any other oil pipeline will not cross our homelands in British Columbia.

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CSTC Invites Dr. James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues

CSTC Invites Dr. James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues

PDF Version – Press Release

Open Letter – PDF Version

Dakelh Territory, Prince George, British Columbia.  Canada. The Chiefs of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council have extended an invitation to Dr. James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues to come visit with the CSTC Chiefs and its members.  The CSTC request is part of several others from First Nations in BC and Canada, including a recent one from the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC).  There however seems to be a delay by the Government of Canada in processing the formalities needed by Dr. Anaya to visit First Nations peoples in Canada.

Tribal Chief Teegee said, “It’s an important time for our people to have Dr. Anaya visit our communities.  There are so many major projects being proposed on our lands including 5 natural gas pipelines, Enbridge’s doomed project and several mines.” Canada needs to commit to allowing Mr. Anaya an opportunity to meet with First Nations in BC and in Canada.

In addition to natural resource projects, the CSTC is concerned too about all the murdered and missing women in northern BC.  Highway 16, which crosses the CSTC territory, is also known as the Highway of Tears, a notorious region known for women and girls going missing or murdered.  In February 2013, Human Right Watch released the report: Nilhchuk-un: Those Who Take Us Away, which CSTC participated in its development.  This report makes several recommendations to the government, RCMP and the United Nations Human Rights Council, regarding the urgent changes needed to address the abuses to First Nations women and girls by the RCMP.  The report also echoes the call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered indigenous women across Canada.

“We are concerned that the Harper government is delaying Dr. Anaya’s paperwork in order to enter Canada.  Canada still has a long way to go to change the historical systemic racism of its policies and practices against Indigenous peoples in Canada.  We need to continue to make our voices heard and go to the international level to expose the world to the human rights violations facing our peoples,” said Chief Karen Ogen of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.

“The CSTC Chiefs would be honoured to host Dr. Anaya in CSTC territory.  We will work with the Canadian government to ensure that he is allowed into Canada to meet with our people,” stated Tribal Chief Terry Teegee. 

– 30 –

Media contacts:  Tribal Chief Terry Teegee:  Office (250) 562-6279.  Cell: (250) 640-3256
Chief Karen Ogen: (250) 251-2240

More info:  Open Letter to Dr. Anaya.  Union of BC Indian Chiefs. http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/News_Releases/UBCICNews02141301.html#axzz2NpXqzyR8

Dakelh Territory, Prince George, British Columbia.  Canada. The Chiefs of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council have extended an invitation to Dr. James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues to come visit with the CSTC Chiefs and its members.  The CSTC request is part of several others from First Nations in BC and Canada, including a recent one from the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC).  There however seems to be a delay by the Government of Canada in processing the formalities needed by Dr. Anaya to visit First Nations peoples in Canada.

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AFN Statement on the Appointment of Special Federal Representative on West Coast Energy Infrastruct

March 19, 2013

AFN Statement on the Appointment of Special Federal Representative on West Coast Energy Infrastructure

(Ottawa, ON) – “Without a doubt, recognizing First Nations’ rights and responsibilities and fully engaging First Nations is essential to achieving mutually beneficial approaches to sustainable resource development. Today’s announcement of a Special Representative to undertake direct discussion with First Nations while affirming the need for environmental protection and full respect for inherent and Treaty rights is a promising development. At the same time, the Government must be seized with the need for substantive change addressing outstanding land issues through comprehensive claims reform and treaty implementation. We will remain vigilant on this process and insist on the greatest possible engagement, openness and transparency to support First Nations rights and interests to be maximized.“

It is estimated that over $650 billion worth of resource development projects in the coming years will affect First Nations territories. “It will be critical to these projects, and to the Canadian economy, that First Nation people and concerns be addressed respectfully,” said AFN Alberta Regional Chief Cameron Alexis. “Our peoples need to be full partners in development. With partnership comes full participation from revenue sharing to ownership, from employment to environmental stewardship.”

“First Nations seek full compliance and respect for constitutional and all obligations of the Federal Government as set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). In addition, it is acknowledged in the January 11th meeting with Prime Minister Harper, First Nations will continue to press forward to this government of the profound benefits to working in good faith on all matters that affect our lands, our rights and our people,” said AFN National Chief.

“Certainly one of the biggest public policy issues facing all British Columbians is pipeline development and tanker traffic, and whether or not bitumen and other products can be moved safely across our lands and waters and whether the risks are worth it,” said AFN BC Regional Chief Jody Wilson-Raybould. “For most First Nations the decision has already been made – that the risk is not worth it. Others are still considering their options. All are doing so based on their Aboriginal title and rights, including treaty rights, as the legitimate stewards of their lands and waters.” Wilson-Raybould continued, “Mr. Eyford has his work cut out for him. We look forward to reading his report assuming it will be made public. Ultimately, accommodating our Nations can only occur with recognition of our rights followed by reconciliation with the Crown.”


The Government of Canada appointed The Special Federal Representative, Douglas Eyford, to engage with First Nations communities in British Columbia and Alberta on future energy infrastructure development. The Special Federal Representative will report directly to the Prime Minister and will issue a Final Report by November 29, 2013.


The Assembly of First Nations is the national organization representing First Nations citizens in Canada. Follow AFN on Twitter @NCAtleo, @AFN_Comms, @AFN_Updates.

-30-

Contact information:

Jenna Young AFN Communications Officer
613-241-6789, ext 401; 613-314-8157 or jyoung@afn.ca

Alain Garon AFN Bilingual Communications Officer 6
13-241-6789, ext 382; 613-292-0857 or agaron@afn.ca

(Ottawa, ON) – “Without a doubt, recognizing First Nations’ rights and responsibilities and fully engaging First Nations is essential to achieving mutually beneficial approaches to sustainable resource development. Today’s announcement of a Special Representative to undertake direct discussion with First Nations while affirming the need for environmental protection and full respect for inherent and Treaty rights is a promising development. At the same time, the Government must be seized with the need for substantive change addressing outstanding land issues through comprehensive claims reform and treaty implementation. We will remain vigilant on this process and insist on the greatest possible engagement, openness and transparency to support First Nations rights and interests to be maximized.“

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Who will protect the land from reckless development?

Canadian political leaders remain in thrall to gaudy casino economies, like prisoners suffering from an economic Stockholm syndrome.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/03/17/who_will_protect_the_land_from_reckless_development.html

LOLA LANDEKIC FOR THE TORONTO STAR

By: Ian Gill Published on Sun Mar 17 2013

A shorter version of this essay appeared on the Opinion page of the Star on March 17.

 

Several years ago, sitting in my office in Vancouver where I was heading up Ecotrust Canada — a west coast conservation and community development organization — I received a call from Alberta from a senior communications executive at Shell Canada.

 

Shell, at the time, was at the early stages of a coal bed methane exploration program in Northern British Columbia, specifically in Tahltan country, in and around Iskut. The natives, it seems, were restless. Shell had provincial permits to develop lands in a region called the Klappan, adjacent to the Spatsizi wilderness area, and had been trying to get trucks and drill rigs in place to pursue its legal authority to assay the abundant gas reserves there. It had sunk three test wells, but that’s as far as it got.

 

A rump of recalcitrant and disobedient natives had blockaded the one easy road in, and signs that said “Get the Shell out!” and their like were showing up on the news.

 

Ecotrust had a hard-earned reputation for working well with First Nations to help them map their resources — or what was left of them — and map their social, environmental and economic futures in a rapidly evolving socio-political and legal environment that was finally waking up to the importance of Indigenous rights and title.

 

The Shell guy claimed the company had the support of most Tahltan people, but there was a noisy minority that was skewing local opinion and endangering the community’s chances of reaping manifold economic benefits from Shell’s willingness to invest heavily in the industrialization of the region.

 

Would Ecotrust, he asked, be willing to undertake a land-use mapping project for the Tahltan? With good maps and good information, the reasoning apparently went, all Tahltan people would come to see Shell’s plans to use some of their territory for gas extraction as being in the community’s best interest (along with Shell’s, obviously).

 

Who would pay for this exercise, I asked? Well, Shell, came the reply. And under whose authority was Shell proposing to undertake this exercise? Well, Shell would sponsor the work with the agreement of the Tahltan, or at least that part of the community that was already onside. Would all Tahltan be equally represented in the land-use study? Would all viewpoints be on the table? If the mapping inquiry were to entertain all possible outcomes, would one outcome — admittedly out there in left field — contemplate that there be no industrial development at all?

 

In other words, if an honest examination of the Tahltan’s options were to uncover widespread opposition to Shell’s use of their land, no matter how many permits the company had on paper, would Shell honour that finding and surrender its “rights” to exploit Tahltan resources for private gain? Was Shell, at least in theory, prepared to walk away if the Tahltan withheld their permission?

 

I asked these questions not to be provocative, but to get clarity about whether the company really was prepared to negotiate, or if their starting assumption was that Shell would develop the gas resources to some extent, the limit of which might or might not be determined by local opinion, or, more likely, by enforcing court orders against the protesters. Oh, and just to be clear, Ecotrust would not work for Shell. Were we to do any analysis, the community would be our client, which was our only surety that the community supported the process. If they accepted Shell’s money to underwrite the analysis, that was their business — but it would not influence how we did ours.

 

The man from Shell was a smart and fair-minded guy, as I recall, but he was a realist, too. He told me there was no way he could sell his executive on an exercise that in any way entertained the notion that the company would abandon its leases. Shell intended to develop its tenures, which had been issued under provincial government authority. The issue at hand was whether or not a land-use mapping exercise would facilitate the community agreeing to Shell’s plan, which at best would be modified by local input, perhaps even allowing for an increase in local benefits. In Shell’s corporate mind, there was never any doubt that it would one day drill not just three test wells in Tahltan country, but two or three thousand gas gushers in one of the most pristine corners of what is left of British Columbia.

 

I politely demurred.

 

A few months later, I was invited to attend a meeting of First Nations leaders and their supporters from across northern B.C., who rallied in favour of protecting what had then come to be known as the Sacred Headwaters. One afternoon, at the site of the continuing blockade, a large map of Tahltan territory was displayed by the elders. Which part of the territory is important to the Tahltan, someone asked? An elder took a marker and drew a line around the outside edges of the map. All of it, he said, and no one disagreed. Where did the elders think Shell should operate? On none of it, they said, and no one disagreed. That was in the summer of 2006.

 

One week before Christmas, 2012, the B.C. government announced a permanent ban on oil and gas development in the Sacred Headwaters. “As part of a tripartite agreement, Shell Canada is immediately withdrawing plans to explore for natural gas in the Klappan by relinquishing its tenures,” the province said in a statement. “In addition, the Province of British Columbia will not issue future petroleum and natural-gas tenures in the area.”

 

“Today is a huge milestone,” said Annita McPhee, chair of the Tahltan Central Council, which governs the Tahltan First Nation. “I am just beyond words about how deeply moved I am about Shell giving up its tenures in the Klappan.”

 

Karen Tam Woo, a campaigner with ForestEthics Advocacy, one of the environmental groups that spearheaded the international campaign to protect the Sacred Headwaters, was jubilant. “Days like today are few and far between,” she said. “It’s a big deal when small communities can stand up to one of the biggest corporations in the world and win.”

 

Shell, which reportedly spent $30 million and a decade going nowhere in the Klappan, was rewarded with $20 million in development credits in the province’s northeast and, after removing its test wells and remediating the area, will leave the Klappan for good.

 

Enbridge should be so lucky. It is reportedly spending $250 million promoting a project that will no doubt win National Energy Board approval in the coming months, although almost certainly to no avail. The informed consensus is that its Northern Gateway pipeline is dead because too many First Nations communities oppose it. Perhaps out of fear of setting a precedent, the company persists — as does the government — in a doomed approvals process that no one seems to know how to call time on.

 

First Nations and community groups who are opposed to the pipeline are forced to spend their own countless hours and millions of dollars locked in successive rounds of futile hearings, while drawing the ire of Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who characterizes anyone opposed to industrial development as a “radical.” In early February, a key coastal First Nations intervenor finally gave up, its paltry funds simply no match for Enbridge’s quarter billion, and the inexhaustible resources of government.

 

When Enbridge, like Shell before it, abandons its project, it will no doubt seek to be compensated for its failed efforts. First Nations and environmentalists won’t be compensated, but will otherwise feel rewarded with another “victory” against industry. But there will be plenty of new battles to lose, as Canada continues to encourage investments in an old industrial paradigm that has long-since run its course. Maybe we’ll ship tarsands products east, not west! Maybe Keystone will take them south! — and if we can’t find investors here at home, we can always sell off nationally crucial energy assets to countries like China, who will be happy to extract resources in a foreign country when it can exploit that country’s weak environmental laws.

 

That irony alone should give serious pause to Canadians. Certainly, it adds more fuel to Idle No More, given that First Nations are at the front lines of just about every attempt — large or small — to develop Canada’s natural resources in this, our climate change century.

 

§

 

Coming back to Canada after almost three years abroad, it is hard not to conclude that this is a lousy way to run a country. The reflexive response from many people is to demonize the Conservatives, and blame Stephen Harper for everything. Mere hours after arriving back in Vancouver last fall, I found myself in the middle of what has become a constant, unofficial (and admittedly unscientific) disapprovals hearing. At the grocery store: a mother and teenage daughter buttonholing me to tell me they will lie down naked in front of bulldozers if construction of Northern Gateway is ever attempted (well, I actually think the teenager was humouring her mother, as I doubt she’d really lie down in the buff in front of a bunch of pipeline workers).

 

Over dinner, people who have never evinced even the slightest interest in aboriginal issues now siding with First Nations’ opposition to Bills C38 and C45. In the news: the Premier of B.C. and the Opposition leader in rare, pre-election agreement that Northern Gateway ill-serves British Columbia. On a trip to Toronto: decidedly unradical, un-environmental Canadians telling me that they are ashamed of the country’s addiction to oil and its treatment of aboriginal people and, unprompted, making a causal link between the two.

 

I’m asked about Australia, where I lived and worked most recently, and the news from there isn’t really any better. Canada is not alone in suffering from a split personality when it comes to managing the demands of a growing and greedy society in an era of fiscal austerity and rapidly accelerating environmental stress — let alone dealing fairly with its Indigenous people. Australia, precariously ruled by a government that is the antithesis of the Harper Conservatives, is in precisely the same bind. Sure, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has brought in a carbon tax and, with the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate, has been forced to accommodate a plethora of demands that not even the wettest Chrétien or Martin Liberals would have tolerated in their most progressive years.

 

But Australia, like Canada, remains in a kind of dead man’s dance between government and industry and Indigenous people, largely because both national governments are unable or unwilling to honestly confront the depth of the deceit upon which both countries have based their economies. Both nations have begun to reach the limits of government authority based on a lie — the continued denial of the rights and title of aboriginal peoples. They are beginning to experience the stirring of what might come to be — almost as a mirror to the ecological disruptions that threaten our physical existence — a succession of century-defining social and political disruptions that could put our national governments on an endangered species list all of their own making.

 

What we are beginning to witness, and it goes well beyond Idle No More, is a withdrawal of permission.

 

Idle No More hints at a profound rupture that goes well beyond the established set of grievances that we seem content to stamp on First Nations like a birthmark. Canada’s entire national narrative has begun to fracture, and if Stephen Harper is deaf to the change in tone, he is not alone. Harper, no different from Liberal prime ministers who preceded him, interprets his party’s majority in the House of Commons as his authority to govern the whole country, and fair enough. In our system, that authority is granted every few years in an election. Permission, by contrast, needs to be won every day — and increasingly, governments and their industry partners don’t have it, or are finding it a lot harder to get it.

 

As an aboriginal woman told me in Australia, “You can’t buy a social licence.”

 

Or, put another way, people are getting tired of the unequal terms of trade — especially when, for Indigenous people, the promised benefits of industrialization of their territories almost never materialize in ways that improve their well-being. In fabulously wealthy economies like ours, basic services like clean water, access to decent health care, good schools, habitable housing — these should be a birthright of every citizen, not something offered up as a signing bonus for joining Team Tar Sands, or its equivalent.

 

Under our current economic and political regimes — no matter which party is nominally in power, with however large or small a majority — Australians and Canadians share one thing, which is that we are everywhere conflicted. We say we want to create viable and diverse economies and societies for the benefit of our children and theirs. We say we want to protect the environment, to “care for our country” as one Australian government program trumpets, yet we hand most of it over to miners and drillers and tell our farmers they should all go and get fracked.

 

How does it come to pass that one of the great life-giving waterways of a dry country, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, is compartmentalized to the point that the river system itself is now assigned “environmental flows,” as if Nature is just another stakeholder in the division of assets of, well, Nature? How is it that in Canada, whose water assets are vastly more valuable in the long run than its oils and gases, almost all our waterways are now open for development and potential ruin by modern day hunters — of hydrocarbons?

 

In both countries, we say we want Indigenous people to prosper, yet a mantra of “closing the gap” between the life experiences of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people has become a one-way street to extinguishment of Indigenous rights, with policy-makers unable to offer anything more in return than trickle-down benefits or outright interventions in the lives of Indigenous people who are asked (or forced) to surrender their lands to the greater good. This, when all that many Indigenous people have is their land, and what remains of their culture.

 

All the while, our political leaders and the public at large remain in thrall to gaudy casino economies, like prisoners suffering from a sort of economic Stockholm syndrome. Everyone knows it can’t last, but while it does, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and aboriginal people mostly get jail terms.

 

So, might this not be the time to dramatically rethink the very nature of this large, uncontrolled experiment that we call the modern industrial economy? “If this is economic success, why does it hurt so badly?” wrote a columnist in The Sydney Morning Herald, bemoaning how utterly unaffordable and unsustainable the Australian way of life is becoming. Put another way: if it hurts so much, why do we keep doing what we do, and call it economic success? Or, as the American humorist Will Rogers once famously said: “If you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Or, as John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

 

So what’s a government to do well? Perhaps it should start by not doing ill, like forcing developments on people and places that don’t want them. Native and environmental objections to oilsands and fracking and pipelines and coal exports and LNG plants might be dismissed as rampant or radical NIMBY-ism, but government and industry are misreading the mood.

 

Yes, people are objecting to specific developments as they always have and will, but I believe there is a deeper strain of disquiet in Canada at the lack of a national narrative that people feel either attached to, or at least willing to tolerate for the greater good. At the moment, the default fora for discussions about the nation’s future are environmental assessment panels, the courts, campfires at blockades, or rallies like those stirred up by Idle No More. Yes, there are occasional political meetings like those between the Assembly of First Nations and Stephen Harper, but they are too narrowly framed, and are surely doomed anyway given that the Prime Minister says he is unwilling to revisit Bills C38 and C45, which gave rise to Idle No More in the first place.

 

Outside the confines of Ottawa and Canberra, the daily discourse gets angrier. In both Canada and Australia, the confusion between authority and permission is perhaps best exemplified by the fracking industry’s having riled some of the most conservative (ie least radical) constituents in either country — their farmers. Rural people are now waking up to the sight of drilling rigs invading, often without prior warning and without their permission, a landscape that they’ve nurtured for generations. Some of them, seeing their territory defiled, are beginning to identify with the plight of aboriginal people for the first time. Some of them have pledged to defend their land, at gunpoint if need be, from what they consider to be tantamount to trespass.

 

Writ large, and uncorrected, what is to stop the trajectories of two of the world’s most prosperous, egalitarian, diverse, generous and lucky countries from descending into the kind of anger, dissonance and unrest that, elsewhere in the world, is only kept at bay by the military? Who says the arc of history, to cite a phrase beloved of politicians, is actually a rainbow? What if the arc bends not to more pots of gold, but to calamity, discontent, and insurrection? What is to stop Idle No More becoming not just viral, but violently so. Imagine Canada or Australia as dangerous, militarized petro-states. Too far-fetched? Really? That day might be closer than you think.

 

§

 

In the far northwest of Australia is a region called the Kimberley. Like Canadians’ love affair with a north that few have ever seen, many more Australians have heard about the Kimberley than have been there, but almost everyone agrees its natural and cultural heritage is beyond compare. What is less well known is just how perilous the Kimberley’s future is. Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s massive gas plant planned for a remote place on the coast called James Price Point is the thin edge of a very thick wedge that, within a generation, could utterly transform the Kimberley into something akin to Alberta’s tarsands. Whether or not the Woodside proposal gets up — and commercially that looks questionable — it has unwittingly served to galvanize people into demanding a new approach to development in Northern Australia. Woodside is Australia’s Enbridge, and James Price Point is its Northern Gateway.

 

In the Kimberley, the Western Australian government invited local aboriginal people to vote on whether or not James Price Point should proceed. It did so after the Premier, Colin Barnett, warned that if the tiny, divided, and impoverished Indigenous community didn’t vote for the project, he would expropriate their land anyway. They voted, barely, in favour of the project. Under clear duress, they gave the most tentative of permissions, in return for the promise of $1.5 billion in “benefits” that, if history is any guide, will be a mirage, hovering unrealized in the distance in a tantalizing sort of socio-economic heat haze.

 

Such was the state government’s anxiety about its tenuous permission to proceed that last year, when Woodside sent a convoy of heavy equipment to the site to begin clearing the way for the development, the government sent more than 140 armed police up from Perth to escort the machinery down one of the remotest dirt roads in the country, past a couple of dozen peaceful protesters. Many Australians were shocked at the overkill. Is that, now, how the west gets won? With deceitful acquisitions, a denial of rights, an ultimatum, and guns and jackboots to back up the deal? Why not throw in a little booze and smallpox for good measure?

 

During extensive travels in the Kimberley, I discovered a palpable sense there that, having been happily out of sight and out of mind for a couple of centuries, people worry that the region is poised to be rapidly beset by a chain reaction of developments that would utterly change its culture and character — not to mention its ecology — for the worse. There is little confidence that industrial development will confer any lasting wealth on the region’s 40,000 residents, half of whom are aboriginal people who, in Australia as globally, have lost the most and gained the least from the pervasive spread of consumerism. Why would the next development surge be any different there? And why would Northern Gateway really be any different here?

 

In Canada and Australia, our resource booms have allowed us to avoid the hard conversation we need to have. Politicians of all ideological stripes offer little but a Hobson’s choice to add more pavement to a path we’ve already been down. They apparently have little appetite for an honest re-evaluation of the kind of societies we are trying to build and want to live in. We shouldn’t need earthquakes, floods, fires, droughts, disease and the growing spectre of climate change to remind us that our tenure on Earth is wholly at Nature’s discretion, but still we are dragged into a development model that portends more and more catastrophes for all of us, and especially for our nations’ most vulnerable citizens.

 

So in Canada, what if, instead, we decide not to ransack every last corner of our vast country in search of commodities that we can sell abroad or to ourselves, but we experiment in developing an economy that honours local culture and history, celebrates place, protects the environment, increases the resilience of local people, and provides them with the means to invest in a future of their own design? Why not attempt, while we still have the option, to pursue a natural model of development, to pursue what the late Jane Jacobs once so aptly called “reliable prosperity?”

 

In that regard, Indigenous people arguably offer not more despair, but hope. If we are to prepare ourselves for the inevitable shocks that the 21st Century still has in store, it might behoove us to seek lessons in resilience from people who have survived every imaginable assault, and are just now coming back into a position of prominence and eminence in a country that might yet come to see aboriginal people as powerful and visionary citizens with a capacity for forgiveness and an appetite for regeneration and renewal, whose unwillingness to assimilate may turn out to be their best defence against the boom that the rest of us seem powerless or unwilling to resist.

 

Inasmuch as the underlying theme of the Idle No More movement in Canada is the protection of lands and waters and natural resources that Indigenous people see as essential to their well-being, and given that many non-native people are rallying alongside First Nations for the same reasons, why not call upon aboriginal people to lead the development of a new narrative for Canada? Why not — a couple of centuries too late but, you know, better late than never — why not charge those whose land this originally was with articulating a vision for Canada as the truly fair country it could be? Who better to create the narrative for a better, fairer and less destructive economy than our country’s natural storytellers and storykeepers, the original and best stewards of our land?

 

Why not give to aboriginal people the task of creating a framework that enables them to negotiate an enduring political settlement that promises them, and non-aboriginal Canadians, more than today’s endless, dishonest incrementalism? What might that look like, and what might the consequences be? What might transformative change actually look like? How ambitious might we dare to be? How provocative?

 

Certainly, an authentic new narrative is not going to materialize if we wait for government to give it to us. A study by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the UK looked at the impediments against transformative innovation in the public sector, noting that many public organizations are trapped “in an eternal present” that is inimical to the kind of pattern-altering innovation in the public realm demanded by today’s challenges. “Public organizations with short time-horizons — governments with very small majorities, ministers and officials with short job tenures, and organizational cultures focused on tomorrow’s news coverage — are highly resistant to innovation . . . It’s no wonder that the world’s public sectors are failing to innovate fast enough to cope with enormous challenges like an aging population or climate change.”

 

My colleague Ric Young notes that “in an era of austerity the public discourse is focused on painful trade-offs and difficult belt-tightening. We think of austerity in economic terms. But our economic constraints are also coupled with an austerity of imagination, an austerity of hope for the future.” Young, founder of Canada’s Social Projects Studio and arguably the country’s leading architect of social change strategies, recalls that at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year a central topic of conversation was the widespread failure of leadership to rise to the critical challenges of our time.

 

“Throughout the world, trust in leadership has been in steep decline for many years,” Young says. “One of the delegates who had conducted extensive public opinion research globally characterized the general attitude as ‘disgust for corporations and disdain for governments.’ A belief in the possibility of authentic, transformative societal value creation is undermined by a sense of overarching self-interest in the private sector and a sense of under-reaching paralysis in the public sector.”

 

Yet if we are to get out of our current financial and cultural austerity traps, nothing less than transformative social value creation will do. “Social innovation is — or should be — about nothing less than big change,” says Young, who visited the Kimberley with me in 2010 and saw for himself what Indigenous people there are confronting, just as he logged countless hours with me in BC’s coastal First Nations communities in the decade before I went to Australia. Young says the dynamics of transformation “are weird. They are not reducible to simple cause and effect explanations. They do not unfold in a linear, predictable or manageable fashion . . . Transformations — big flips — can happen in social systems, just as they do in natural systems. Ignoring that fact is like ignoring that at a certain point — a non-linear point — water can become vapour.”

 

There are numerous examples of where seemingly intractable social problems have “flipped” into a transformed state that would have been unimaginable in all but the mind of a dreamer. A generation ago, who ever thought that smokers would be unable to puff away in a bank queue or at the doctor’s office or in the smoking section of an aircraft, but instead, would be forced to huddle outside office buildings and be barred from smoking in a pub? What has happened to smoking is what Young describes as a “proof of possibility.” Someone imagined the possibility of smoking being transformed from a socially acceptable and ubiquitous practice to such pariah status that cigarette companies now are being forced to advertise that the main consequence of using their product is that it poisons you. That’s big change.

 

So what, in wealthy countries like Australia and Canada, what might tip the scales towards transformative, positive outcomes for Indigenous peoples, and thereby us all? What possibility could we imagine, what intervention might succeed where current ones have failed? It is a fundamental question, because as Young has observed over the years, clients so often come to him framing their social issues as problems, and in Australia and Canada, for decades now, Indigenous issues have been framed as nothing but problems. “No one ever talks about possibility,” Young says. “It is time to shock people with a sense of the possible.”

 

Surely it is possible to imagine a natural model of development in which we no longer chase a commodity “fix” — think of a heroin addict, with accompanying highs and desperate lows — but where we actually design an economy based on distinctive opportunities that arise gradually from the intimate interaction of people and place. An economy that produces an infinite diversity of products and services that grow out of both social and natural capital, in a kind of “get rich slow” approach to economic prosperity that is more reliable, more diverse and resilient, and is more equitably shared. It is possible to imagine that such an economy might be co-created with Indigenous people and that, in fact, an Indigenous approach to economic development might become not just a niche play, but eventually mainstream.

 

Why not? Fifty, maybe 100 years from now, certainly 200 years from now, the world will be casting around for new (old) ideas about how to live through the growing shocks to our increasingly fragile and futile economy, and our ever more unstable political system. The solutions that future generations will seek will be cultural, not political; they will be natural, not technological (although technology will sometimes help). They will seek lessons in long-term resilience, not quarterly performance. They will look, as the author Paul Hawken has written, to “people who have a fundamental relationship to the land.” But why wait?

 

What would it look like to take a very big leap, right now, that puts Indigenous people in the driver’s seat in developing a new cultural, environmental and economic vision for Canada, and actually delivering on that vision? This is what the father of resilience theory, C.S. “Buzz” Holling, would call a “safe-fail” experiment. We could fail at this and no-one would be catastrophically worse off because they already are; but if we succeed, we will have taken an important first step toward reliable prosperity — and we will have a distinctive market advantage over regions in the world still fighting the same old battles over who gets to issue a social licence, and at what cost.

 

Make no mistake: the jurisdictions that figure out a natural model of development that supports and is supported by its Indigenous peoples will be the clear and only winners in the 21st century; the industries that embrace the kind of transformative changes this will demand will succeed, and those that don’t will die. The hardest hurdle to overcome will be creating a pathway for industry and government to feel comfortable with uncertainty, which they abhor, because a critical test will be that this not be an industry-driven or government-led command and control solution, although their constructive participation will be key. For Indigenous people, a critical indicator of success will be the extent to which they can — to put it bluntly — get the government out of their lives, and only let industry in on their own terms.

 

As a country, we need firstly to map our vulnerabilities and opportunities through the eyes of Indigenous people themselves — not some dreamy, sepia-toned depiction of the past, but a marriage of Indigenous knowledge with the sort of modern economic planning and scenario building that is second nature in mainstream development. People have a right to know what the future holds for their energy, food, water, land and marine systems under various development scenarios, and today’s planning tools offer a path to information democracy that was unthinkable even a generation ago.

 

Perhaps it is time to establish a kind of Indigenous sovereign wealth fund into which industry and government contribute capital that is then reinvested in Indigenous impact partnerships based on their success, not government’s failure. Not only might this “flip” the system by creating a reliably prosperous economy for Indigenous people — this approach has the added potential of drastically reducing our collective dependency on industrial booms as this country’s principal source of wealth.

 

Who could lead this work? Well, who better than A-in-chut, Shawn Atleo? Currently the National Chief of the AFN, Atleo is a gifted orator, a natural storyteller and a widely admired and uncorrupted consensus builder, someone who is perhaps uniquely able to honour the past and imagine a future that all Canadians could relate to. He has shown an ability to negotiate and hold his own at the highest levels nationally and abroad, without ever losing sight of his Nuu-chah-nulth west coast roots. At some point, especially given the corrosive and divisive nature of AFN politicking, Atleo will need a broader canvas upon which to work. Why not the whole country?

 

It is his kind of integrative leadership — his ability to both set the conditions and forge a vision of the future — that is both absent today, and essential if we are to fulfill some of the conditions that for big change to occur: a certain defiance of the inevitable, an attempt at pattern-shifting problem solving, room for bottom-up as well as top-down leadership, and room for engagement of all sectors of society — all underpinned with a moral vision that it is no longer acceptable for a rich society to become and remain so at the expense of so many fellow human beings.

 

Sure Canada has apologized to its aboriginal people, in effect admitting to our serial abuses of authority since before Confederation, and ever since, not least through our flagrant dishonour of treaties that were signed in apparent good faith and then ignored. We’ve even struck a Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged to examine parts of this sorry past. Interestingly, Australia has likewise had a reconciliation process and an apology, but travelling through the Kimberley with Patrick Dodson, one of Australia’s most eminent and revered aboriginal leaders, Ric Young and I listened to a sustained refrain from Dodson that the hard work still is still before us — figuring out how to forge a future together.

 

To a degree, Idle No More is calling the dominant society’s bluff, because while we are willing to apologize for what our economic and social systems have done to aboriginal people in the past, we haven’t yet demonstrated a willingness to build a future based on their beliefs, not ours — or at the very least, shared beliefs, not just ours. Instead, we apologize for a system’s ill effects, and then invite aboriginal people to take cheap equity in the same system that caused them such harm in the first place.

 

In many ways, the most urgent issue confronting our country is to develop a critical competency that we sorely lack — this business of future-making. Clearly, it cannot be led by politicians and CEOs because they are no longer trusted. If we want to live in a fair country, then we need to be intentional about what that’s going to take, and who is going to get us there. Our aboriginal people will only escape the past, and we with them, if they rediscover what it means to make a future. If it is a matter of trust, then I trust them a lot more than I trust myself. What lies before us all, if we are serious, is a lot of what Young predicts will be “sheer stubborn muddling through” at first, because we need to approach this task in exactly the opposite way that Shell wanted to reach its foregone conclusion in the Klappan those many years ago. We need to start without a sheaf of predetermined outcomes or a list of performance indicators, but to embark on the true dialogue this country desperately needs to have.

 

There will be strong resistance from many quarters, which may or may not be surmountable, but there are visionary and courageous people in this country, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, and innovative ones too. A fair Canada will probably be a lot less environmental and a lot less industrial than the current one, so maybe no one will be happy. But with dire warnings that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resource developments are in the offing, and with no real vision for how to accommodate Indigenous interests and genuine environmental concerns, what are the prospects that this can end well without a thorough transformation of Canada’s national narrative?

 

More than 100 years ago, Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness that, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” It wasn’t pretty then, and it isn’t pretty now — and it won’t be in another hundred years, either. Apocalypse then, apocalypse still. We’ve had a century of military-industrial development, and we know exactly where it’s gotten us. Only big change, only strange change, can bring about the kind of transformation that our society, indeed all societies, so desperately need.

 

CODA: I began this piece with a personal story, about navigating power imbalances and competing agendas between industry, aided and abetted by governments, and local people who wished to be left in peace. While formulating this analysis, I was daily tuned to all sorts of coverage of Keystone, Northern Gateway and the many other proposals that oscillate between the business pages and page 1. Throughout, I have been trying to understand not just the motivations of people and organizations, but their mood. Let me end on another, highly personal note.

 

One day, I received a document attached to an email from my wife, who is still in Australia completing a contract. The document was labelled “Presentation,” and the cover email asked, “Did you see this?” It turns out the document was a typed account of an oral presentation to the NEB’s contentious hearings about Northern Gateway that had just wrapped up in Victoria. I read the account and was highly moved by it

 

An unidentified woman had addressed the panel and in her own way, had gone right to the heart of the difference between authority and permission. “When I was 18, I was raped,” she said. She was a young babysitter raped by an older man, an authority figure in her neighbourhood who had begged off ill from a couples’ night out to prey on her right there in his house. In her presentation, she equated this with industry and government’s failure to understand what First Nations people mean when they say no.

 

We’ve all heard the environmental rhetoric about “raping” old-growth forests or the oceans, and I must say it has always struck me as unhelpfully inflammatory. Now, here was a woman telling the NEB panel that she saw no difference between what happened to her more than half a century earlier, what has been happening to aboriginal people for generations, and what is happening right now to the planet.

 

Nothing in the statement identified the woman, but then some news reports picked up her testimony. “Speakers compare Northern Gateway project to rape, drug addiction,” said one headline. One story quoted from the statement, and that story named the woman who had made it: Jean Jordan, my wife’s mother, my children’s grandmother, breaking a silence of her entire adult life because of her passionate belief that we have a moral obligation to change the course of this country before it’s too late. She is exactly the kind of quiet, courageous Canadian — a retired teacher, a law-abiding, taxpaying citizen who does the cryptic crossword and cooks the turkey that I carve each holiday season, a woman just like millions of others — who is starting to exert her own authority. Who is idle, and silent, no more.

 

Ian Gill, who served as president of Ecotrust in Canada, the U.S. and most recently in Australia, is a former newspaper and CBC Television journalist, and the author of All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation. He is an Australian and Canadian citizen. He lives in Vancouver. gillfile@gmail.com . Twitter: @gillwave

 

 

 

Several years ago, sitting in my office in Vancouver where I was heading up Ecotrust Canada — a west coast conservation and community development organization — I received a call from Alberta from a senior communications executive at Shell Canada.

Shell, at the time, was at the early stages of a coal bed methane exploration program in Northern British Columbia, specifically in Tahltan country, in and around Iskut. The natives, it seems, were restless. Shell had provincial permits to develop lands in a region called the Klappan, adjacent to the Spatsizi wilderness area, and had been trying to get trucks and drill rigs in place to pursue its legal authority to assay the abundant gas reserves there. It had sunk three test wells, but that’s as far as it got.

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Collaborative Project Help First Nations Take Part in Carbon Markets

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has issued two reports as part of the First Nations Carbon Collaborative to help build the capacity of First Nations to take part in existing and emerging carbon markets.

The collaborative is a community-driven initiative spearheaded by IISD, the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources and three First Nations living within Canada’s frontier forests.

Undefined carbon rights and a lack of experience prevent First Nations from accessing carbon markets, even though many of them live within and around the boreal forest region that stores 30 per cent of the world’s carbon, according to 2007 research by Woods Hole Research Center.

The literature review indicates there is little information about First Nations in Canada and carbon markets and that this void will need to be filled before First Nations can become active carbon market participants.

The best practices review found that local ownership enhances potential carbon market benefits, well beyond job creation. The review highlights the need to establish realistic timeframes, as capacity building can take considerable resources and time to deal with such issues as governance, transmitting local and traditional knowledge, operational training, youth development and succession planning.

As an initial capacity-building activity, the University of Toronto’s Centre for Environment in cooperation with the First Nations Carbon Collaborative will be hosting a free First Nations and carbon webinar series every Wednesday from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. (EST) beginning April 20 and ending May 25, 2011.

Webinar topics will include carbon 101, indigenous rights to carbon, emissions trading policies/legislation in Canada, carbon financing, offset projects and First Nations case study carbon projects. Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Shawn Atleo will open the webinar series. Grand Chief Edward John, the North American representative to the United Nations Permanent Forum, will also be a guest speaker.

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For more information please contact IISD project manager Vivek Voora (204) 958-7797 or IISD media and communications officer Nona Pelletier (204) 958-7740.

http://www.iisd.org/climate/land_use/fncc.aspx

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