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Milestone or tombstone?
Tentative aboriginal deal could deepen rift between elected, unelected leaders Gary Park for Petroleum News
Emerging from behind a screen created by COVID-19, the Canadian and British Columbia governments and a handful of hereditary indigenous leaders in northwestern B.C. announced a historic deal that could determine the future of land rights and resource development in a region covering 8,500 square miles and possibly across Canada.
The end result is likely to be either a milestone signaling a new era in relations between First Nations people and the rest of Canada, or a tombstone to those hopes.
What the impact will be on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline to support the LNG Canada project remains uncertain.
For now, the memorandum of understanding deal has been returned to negotiators who have been given a 12-month deadline to develop a final pact that would make the Wet’suwet’en Nations the first in Canada to be recognized as having aboriginal title over their territory.
Behind closed doors? The two governments and eight unelected Wet’suwet’en leaders who partially control some affairs of 3,200 residents, struck the unparalleled deal while attentions were diverted by the COVID-19 pandemic, raising deep suspicions about what occurred behind closed doors.
While their often-conflicting roles are hazy and debatable, the hereditary chiefs are supposed to look after the Wet’suwet’en land, leaving the elected councils to, in the words of one source, “look after everything under the sun with very few resources to do it.”
The MOU has been vehemently opposed by 20 elected First Nations (four of them in Wet’suwet’en territory) which have signed pipeline benefits and access deals with TC Energy.
That means one of the first matters to be resolved is who actually speaks for the Wet’suwet’en people going forward - the elected or the unelected leaders - which some believe is a recipe for disaster and could require a lot of more give and take than was necessary to arrive at the MOU. That could easily be the stage where the tentative pact stumbles.
Unelected chiefs shut down work Four months ago, the issue of unresolved land claims flared up when the unelected chiefs succeeded in shutting down work on the C$40 billion, Shell-led LNG Canada project, the costliest private sector undertaking in Canadian history.
Road and rail blockades initiated in January halted work on the C$6.6 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline, a 400-mile link to deliver gas feedstock to LNG Canada’s liquefaction facility and export terminal at Kitimat on the northern B.C. coast.
Those protests spread rapidly across Canada, with First Nations in Ontario and Quebec, none of them with any direct ties to the LNG Canada project, effectively closing the bulk of Canada’s rail networks, affecting thousands of rail and transportation jobs along with retail businesses and agriculture shipments. Some analysts estimated the initial cost to Canada’s national economy at C$3 billion.
Then COVID-19 slowed work on Coastal GasLink, triggered by a B.C. government ban on gatherings of more than 15 people, putting an end to demonstrations against the pipeline.
But that provided an opportunity for the hereditary chiefs and the two governments to engage in secret negotiations resulting in the MOU, a rare decision that bypassed a costly treaty process that typically takes decades to move through various stages including court action.
“You will be the first indigenous nation in Canada to have recognition of your aboriginal title over your territory,” the hereditary chiefs boasted when they were finally forced into the public spotlight, claiming the tentative terms require them to give up “absolutely nothing.”
Far from final deal However, the MOU is far from a final deal. The parties to that pact are now faced with a massive undertaking to settle “areas of jurisdiction,” including “child and family wellness, water, wildlife, fish, land use planning, lands and resources, revenue sharing, fair and just compensation ... and such other areas as the Wet’suwet’en propose.”
Agreement on those issues is supposed to happen within 12 months, although one observer suggested “it is more likely Donald Trump and Joe Biden will walk together on the moon” before that deadline.
B.C. Premier John Horgan admitted the consultation process has fallen short of his expectations.
“We need to have a resolution to the governance challenges in Wet’suwet’en territory,” he told reporters. “I was hopeful that the (tribe) gathering to discuss the MOU would have been the opportunity for that to occur. Clearly, it hasn’t been perfect.”
One of the elected chiefs, Dan George of the Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation, delivered a blunt verdict.
He said the MOU is equivalent to “signing an agreement to buy a car and negotiating the price later. If the (hereditary chiefs) get title and rights over our lands ... it has huge implications for my members.”
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