There is, evidently, a strong aversion in the mainstream media to talk about the environment and I can only guess why. Was the Kalamazoo spill by Enbridge too complicated to deal with? And the 800+ other spills by this wretched despoiler of the outdoors? The NDP have approved of LNG plants for the northern coast. Does this mean they have satisfied themselves that fracking poses no environmental concerns?...Get with it you guys - the environment is a huge issue and you have a duty to get it in all aspects on the table.

While I have no insight into all the considerations of BC First Nations, I do pretend to know something about politics. Let me tell you what I would feel if I was in Grand Chief Phillip’s mind or that of any BC chief’s position. I would refuse any part of a meeting with the Feds until that part of the past budget that took away from protection of fish habitat is repealed. There would be no parley until both the provincial and federal governments stopped approving of fish farms and mandated a removal to land of all existing farms. I would demand an immediate moratorium of all proposed pipelines until all Native claims are settled.

On January 2, 2013, hundreds of First Nations and non-indigenous people converged on Vancouver's Waterfront Station for the latest Idle No More rally. The beating of drums and singing of traditional songs signaled this crowd's solidarity with the movement that is building across the country and beyond its borders.

Read this story from the Financial Post on the 170 aboriginal legal victories which reinforce the rights and title enshrined in the Constitution Act, meaning that corporations and governments who want to  develop resources in Canada today must engage proactively with First Nations or prepare to see their projects fail. (Dec. 14, 2012)

Canada is orchestrating a big push to accelerate development of its natural resources, but behind the hype there is a shifting and tense legal landscape. First Nations are on a big winning streak in the courts that has empowered them to have a say on projects in big parts of the country.

The tension is pushing corporations to spend huge dollars to keep the peace and move projects along in areas First Nations claim as their traditional lands.

But the approach is piecemeal and there have been few consistently successful strategies. Tension, frustration and confrontation abound. Lawyers, consultants and vested interests fuel and feed off the tension, making it hard to come up with solutions.

Many projects worth billions of dollars have been delayed or sunk altogether.

They include scores of mining, forestry and pipeline projects such as the now-shelved Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline in the Northwest Territories. The Northern Gateway pipeline could be next unless accommodation is found with opposed First Nations in the B.C. interior and on the coast.

Bill Gallagher, a former federal government regulator, oil and gas lawyer, treaty negotiator, and author of a new book, Resource Rulers, Fortune And Folly on Canada’s Road to Resources, argues there is a better way.

“The current situation in terms of access to resources, with the overarching tensions, has become unsustainable,” Mr. Gallagher said in an interview. “That is the key to the whole thing. Recognizing that Plan A has not worked; let’s put a Plan B together.”

The good news: Canadian First Nations are not opposed to development.

The wakeup call: Corporate interests need to accept what the courts already have — that First Nations now hold the balance of power in deciding the fate of Canada’s resource projects because they have rights that others don’t.

It’s a power Mr. Gallagher says is backed up by 170 legal victories — the biggest winning streak in Canadian legal history — that give First Nations a say in how resources are accessed and developed in every region of the country.

The wins are underpinned by the Canadian constitution. When it was repatriated in 1981 by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, First Nations won the inclusion of aboriginal and treaty rights, as well as blanket protection in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

These key measures today comprise the fundamental law of Canada and form the underpinnings of the ensuing native legal winning streak, Mr. Gallagher writes in his book.

The new landscape means the “minimalist approach” used by many resource companies in dealing with Canada’s aboriginals is inadequate.

The new approach will have to involve revenue sharing, building trust and treating First Nations as full partners, perhaps even invite them to be co-applicants before regulatory boards — that’s what it will take to win backing for pipelines in the future, including Northern Gateway, he said.

“As long as [industry] keeps pushing [projects] in the regulatory process, and lawyers are doing all the speaking, that element of trust never gels,” he said. “The process is seen as stacked in favour of industry, and you have these constant challenges.”

Locking up First Nations support goes a long way to tempering environmental movement opposition, Mr. Gallagher said, because the green groups don’t have the same legal standing without aboriginal co-operation.

It’s a conclusion Mr. Gallagher came to by following the evidence.

A negotiator in many of Canada’s resource projects, including the Voisey’s Bay nickel project in Newfoundland, Mr. Gallagher has kept score of the changing legal landscape in many ways — including by way of a map of Canada he keeps in his Waterloo, Ont., home.

It’s sprinkled with coloured pins: red dots where First Nations won a major court case, blue dots where a project crashed or was reconstructed in response to First Nations’ opposition, green dots for wins by the environmental movement that led to huge environmental reserves, yellow dots for projects that get things right the first time.

Indeed, while Canadians have heard plenty about “negative power” or aboriginal opposition to resource projects, there are also many First Nations that are open for business, such as the Haisla Nation in British Columbia and the Inuvialut in the Northwest Territories.

Mr. Gallagher points to the Suncor Energy Inc. and Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil sands projects for doing it right and that today employ thousands of aboriginals and support aboriginal enterprises.

Mr. Gallagher said he is glad there are high-profile national debates over the desirability of oil sands growth and of oil sands export pipelines because they highlight the rise of First Nations and could lead to new approaches.

“The oil sands are essentially encircled with important native legal wins, and pipeline routes extending out from the oil sands are running directly into powerful legal precedents,” he said.

“I think these projects have underestimated the real landscape,” he says. “They may have got the geology right, the geography right and even the marine patterns to some extent right, but they have missed the native empowerment landscape.”

But Mr. Gallagher warns proponents of projects usually get only one chance for a positive relationship — at the beginning — before the various sides are so “lawyered-up” that the conflict feeds on itself.

Read more: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/12/14/170-legal-victories-empower-first-nations-in-fight-over-resource-development/

2012 was a year that began with Conservative Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver dismissing opponents of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipelines as "radicals" and ends with the Idle No More rallies sweeping the nation. It was a year when two very different visions for the future of Canada and its place in the world collided headlong with each other. One seeking to curb the Tar Sands and new arteries essential to its growth, the other striving to make Canada into a new Saudi Arabia - provider of oil, gas and coal to emerging Asian markets. Each policy piece from the Harper Government was part of a bigger puzzle, designed to bring this new vision to fruition.

Watch this presentation by Damien Gillis, co-director of Fractured Land - a documentary in production which examines the industrialization of northern Canada through the eyes of a young indigenous man named Caleb Behn - at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.

How much is our wild salmon worth? What price on our rivers and the ecologies they sustain? Is there any financial arrangement that will compensate for the loss of our coastal fauna and flora as well as the people who, for centuries, have been sustained by those resources? Incidentally, a recent UBC study found that a single oil spill from tankers on BC's coast could wipe out all the economic gains of the Enbridge pipeline...There is this notion that we must continue to “progress”, which is code for "money talks and when it does one should bow down in grateful obeisance to the god Mammon and forever hold our tongues." I reject that notion. We can progress and prosper without placing our entire outdoors at the certain risk of destruction.

In a move that could cost him significant political support, federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has endorsed controversial west-to-east pipeline proposals that would move tar sands crude from Alberta through Ontario and Quebec to Atlantic Canada and points beyond...But according to Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan, “The bottom line is Alberta is selling the wrong product [dilbit]. The glut of bitumen on the market is a result of bitumen looking for appropriate refineries. If the product was SCO [synthetic crude oil], we could be selling the product to any refinery in North America.” As well, many pipeline safety issues could be avoided.

Read this story from the Vancouver Sun on Enbridge's unprecedented access to the Departmen tof Fisheries and Oceans, including their own dedicated internal staff dedicated to the company's project. (Nov. 10, 2012)

Enbridge Inc.'s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project is getting special attention from the federal Fisheries department, according to an internal email obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

In what critics call an unprecedented step, the department has listed a "Northern Gateway Liaison" at a top level of its organizational chart, under a reorganization prompted by the 2012 budget's sweeping Fisheries Act amendments.

The position will report directly to the executive director of the National Ecosystems Management Branch at the department's headquarters.

"This suggests an unprecedented level of access and engagement for a specific project," said Green party leader Elizabeth May, who in the 1980s was a senior adviser to a federal environment minister.

"This is the reality of a government that has told the bureaucracy, 'be prepared to make sure this project goes through.' " B.C. NDP MP Fin Donnelly, his party's deputy fisheries critic, said he's never heard of a company getting such special treatment.

"This clearly exposes the Harper Conservative oil pipeline agenda. They are putting the oil industry ahead of fishing, tourism and all other industries."

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/shows%2BFisheries%2Bfocus%2BGateway/7530065/story.html

Not long after the Defend Our Coast rallies, a pollster phones, wanting to know whom I plan to vote for in the provincial election. The first party to unequivocally say NO to tar sands oil in pipelines and tankers through BC land and waters, I tell her. This causes a bit of confusion, as it clearly isn’t one of the options in front of the caller. So, she asks after some hesitation, the NDP? Given NDP leader Adrian Dix’s tough talk on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, she might very well think so, but where is he on doubling the capacity of the Kinder Morgan pipeline into Burrard Inlet? The silence is deafening.