Indigenous nations have protected the earth on their territories for thousands of years. With the government of Canada ignoring their sovereignty, nations not only see massive theft of resources that could help alleviate social problems, but their exacerbation through their further alienation from their own lands, often accompanying being overrun by development and southern workers, while having no self-determination during this process. In the south of Canada industrial farming displaced many nations with often genocidal results. In the north, a modern equivalent of that fate is only just beginning, wrought on by industrial oil and gas drilling schemes (among many industrial plans) that are condemning entire societies, languages and cultures to a precarious future, becoming minorities in their lands for the first time.
Investment not worth the spills
Smithers Interior News
June 24, 2009
Editor:
Christine Ogryzlo, from the Smithers Exploration Group, suggests in her letter that we should allow Enbridge to bring tar sands pipelines and super crude oil tankers to our coast to show that we support development in this region, acknowledging that it won’t bring about many jobs. That’s a pretty high-risk way to send a message.
Alaska pipeline steals the show
Guy Quenneville
Northern News Services
Published Monday, June 22, 2009
INUVIK - The ninth Inuvik Petroleum Show just couldn't catch a break.
Last year, attendees of the annual oil and gas trade show - though high on news that BP Energy had bid more than $1 billion for a parcel of offshore land in the Beaufort Sea - operated under the shadow of the Joint Review Panel, whose report on the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the $16.2 billion Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP) was still nowhere to be seen.
Pipeline proposal raises vexing questions
Written by Jeannette Paterson
Prince George
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Wanting to get a better sense of how or if the Enbridge pipeline would benefit the majority of British Columbians, I looked back at the Thomas Berger Inquiry held in the 1970s regarding the Mackenzie Delta natural gas pipeline.
It was, of course, recommended that a 10-year moratorium be put in place until the aboriginal people living in the area had completed their land claims and then, from a position of ownership and power, the project could be revisited.
It should be noted that this article posits that the MGP and Alaska Highway gas lines are competing-- more blather aimed at garnering concessions and subsidies from governments, etc. The reality is that the goal of five million barrels a day of tar sands bitumen extraction-- now said to be in line to happen by 2035-- cannot take place without all the MGP gas and most of the Alaskan. Math is not a debatable point.
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Who’s on first?
Exxon-TransCan Alaska gas line push sends tremor through Mackenzie ranks
By Gary Park
Week of June 21, 2009
For Petroleum News
he Politics of Bait and Switch
by Jeffrey St Clair and Joshua Frank
CounterPunch (May 21 2009)
After little more than 100 days in office, the Democrats, under the leadership of Barack Obama, have unleashed a slew of anti-environmental policies that would have enraged any reasonable conservationist during the Bush years.
Defenders of the Land, Private Property Abolitionists-- By Shiri Pasternak
Indigenous peoples in Canada have marked the geographical limits of
capitalist expansion through more than five centuries of permanent
resistance. Due to the geography of residual Aboriginal lands, they form a
final frontier of capitalist penetration for natural resource extraction,
agribusiness, and urban/suburban development. While much of the focus of
the economic crisis has centred on foreclosures and job losses in the
manufacturing and service sectors, a renewed push for resources – e.g. tar
Consultation means nothing without consent
June 16, 2009
Three First Nation Band Councils released a joint statement last month in response to the newly proposed Ontario Mining Act, once again raising a critical issue that the Government of Ontario and the Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly failed to recognize: The right to Say NO.
In effect, the absence of this right (the right of consent) in the Ontario Mining Act or any other piece of legislation in Canada is an allowance by the government to molest Indigenous People.
Federal Court Approves of Regulatory Proceedings as an Appropriate Method to Address Aboriginal Concerns
Source: Fasken Martineau - On May 12, 2009, Mr. Justice Barnes of the Federal Court released his Reasons in Brokenhead Ojibway Nation v. Canada, 2009 FC 484. The court upheld the Governor in Council's approval of the National Energy Board's issuance of Certificates of Public Convenience and Necessity for the construction of three pipeline projects. The projects are the Keystone Pipeline Project, the Southern Lights Pipeline Project and the Alberta Clipper Pipeline Expansion Project.
Cree lawsuit would drain energy royalties
Native band says 15,000 oilsands developments planned on ancestral land
By Elise Stolte, Edmonton Journal
June 12, 2009
The amount Alberta owes First Nations affected by oilsands development could
easily outstrip all the royalties the province has earned off the resource
if courts rule in favour of native bands, said a lawyer for the Beaver Lake
Cree Nation on Thursday.
"We're all expecting an onslaught (of lawsuits) in the next little while,"
said Drew Mildon of Woodwards and Company. "People are reaching their limit
of patience."
Exxon joins TransCanada's Alaska pipeline project
Carrie Tait and Claudia Cattaneo, Financial Post
Thursday, June 11, 2009
CALGARY -- The world's largest publicly owned energy company has thrown its weight behind TransCanada Corp.'s effort to build a natural gas pipeline from Alaska North Slope to the rest of the United States, a move which could jam a stake through the heart of a rival pipeline plan and further haunt Canada's stalled Mackenzie Valley pipeline.
