By Vijay Jayaraj
Obsessed with the faux climate crisis, the Canadian government in Ottawa seemingly discounts altogether the social and economic benefits of natural gas to First Nations communities of the country’s western region.
Approximately 5% of the world’s gas comes from Canada, mainly from the vast Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin underlying several provinces, including British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 2023, the country ranked fifth in global production behind the U.S., Russia, Iran and China.
Some First Nations communities — a designation that takes in indigenous people living south of the Arctic Circle — have historically faced challenges in terms of economic development and social well-being. Limited access to education, healthcare and infrastructure has resulted in lower living standards compared to the national average — a fact that I observed firsthand as a researcher in British Columbia. Unemployment rates are often higher in First Nations communities, and poverty remains a persistent issue.
However, oil and gas development has provided a pathway to prosperity to many of these communities. Liquified natural gas (LNG) projects, for example, require a significant workforce in both construction and operational phases. This translates into direct employment opportunities and much needed income for First Nations people otherwise lacking financial security.
The development of natural gas resources also necessitates infrastructure upgrades in nearby communities. These can include the construction or enhancements of roads, bridges and communication networks. Such improvements benefit the entire community by providing access to markets, educational opportunities and other essential services.
“For far too long, First Nations could only watch as others built generational wealth from the resources of our traditional lands” says Eva Clayton, president of the Nisga’a Lisims government. “But times are changing.”
First Nations participation in natural gas development goes beyond economic benefits. It represents an opportunity for communities to assert their self-determination and participate in shaping their own future. Communities can participate in natural gas projects through equity ownership and various arrangements, including Impact Benefit Agreements. According to the Canada Energy Centre, more than 75 First Nations and Métis communities in Alberta and British Columbia have agreed to ownership stakes in energy projects, including the Coastal GasLink pipeline and major transportation networks for oil sands production.
One such example is the recent Musqueam Partnership agreement by FortisBC, which will share the benefits of the Tilbury LNG facility’s expansion phase to begin in 2025. First Nations beneficiaries will include communities of the Snuneymuxw, T’Sou-ke, Esquimalt, Scia’new, Pacheedaht, Pauquachin, Huu-ay-aht, Kyuquot/Checleseht, Toquaht, Uchucklesaht and Ucluelet. Similarly, the Woodfibre LNG project to begin production in 2027 will directly benefit the Squamish community.
Demand for natural gas in North America and across the world should ensure increasing prosperity into the future, unless the federal government’s climate fetish undermines the industry.
Just such a possibility has prompted an alarm to be sounded by the First Nations LNG Alliance—a collective of communities supportive of LNG development in British Columbia.
“First Nations have made their choice about the LNG opportunity, informed by research and consultation,” says Karen Ogen, CEO of the LNG Alliance,
“However, when 88 environmental groups and other organizations recently demanded an end to LNG, no one bothered to talk to us,” she said. “I view that as a ‘re-colonization’ of energy by environmentalists. It’s a type of eco-colonialism that First Nations people like me are all-too familiar with, particularly as we seek to diversify our economies and provide opportunities for young people and future generations.”
Ms. Ogen’s complaint of “eco-colonialism” is not unlike the charge of “climate imperialism” that has been leveled against Western elites by leaders of the Global South who bristle at being pressured to adopt “green” agendas at the expense of actual economic development supported gas and other fossil fuels.
Indeed, the sentiments of Ms. Ogen almost certainly resonate with those who favor common sense over ideology. “Canadian LNG is Indigenous LNG, and that is good for the world and good for all of us here,” she says.
This commentary was first published at Daily Caller on June 1, 2024
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K.
Masters degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia.
Wow.
Good to see someone from Phil Jones’ Climategate Den of Iniquity that didn’t drink the Kool Aid and has some common sense.
I am shocked! Shocked I tell you that these people have given up their traditional way of life for the vicissitudes of natural gas. What on earth has gotten into these liberal progressives?
Indians or First Nations or whatever they’re called are not liberals for the most part. They are politically similar to the rest of their respective citizenry. What they want is what’s beneficial.
Being anti-LNG is perversely self destructive to the warmunists’ manifesto, because natural gas has the lowest carbon emisions of the fossil fuels in use today. Indeed, most of the reduction in so-called greenhouse gas emissions from advanced economies this past decade has been due to the transition from coal and oil to natural gas for electricity generation.
U.S. Indians do tend to be liberal – or at least they vote for the DNC candidates. Here in Nevada the reservations are very reliable voters, although to encourage them to vote they are given t-shirts at polling locations as well as an invitation for a free meal on their reservation.
I know because I serve am a member of the polling location staff. They don’t try to hide their positions when voting. They’re pretty sure which party will provide the most free stuff.
Income from the sale of LNG is better than depending on gamblers. Maybe they can loose the victim mentality of “re-colonialism”.
Gambling is literally a zero-sum game–while the “house” makes money on gambling losses (whether it is owned by people of European or Native American ancestry), but the money lost by gamblers could have been used for improving their own lives instead of being wasted chasing an elusive jackpot that few people ever win.
If the Native Americans (or First Nations in Canada) are allowed to work in the LNG industry, they would have well-paying jobs, and would be providing low-cost, low-emissions energy for many other people, which would be a win-win situation for everyone.
If you go back to a time before the 15th century beginnings of colonisation from Europe, you could argue that the indigenous did not know about LNG and certainly didn’t need it to survive.
But there was no progress and next to no chance of any further development.
For fans of indigenous peoples untainted by the awful modern world there are still one or two pristine places they can check out. I would suggest North Sentinel island in the Indian ocean. Estimates put the population originating there around 60,000 years ago.
There’s one for the adventure travel agents…
The notion that indigenous peoples in the Americas lived without impacting or changing the natural systems around them is false and has been proven so over the last several decades of anthropological and archaeological research. The “state of nature” found by European-descendant settlers in the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries was what happens when the Americas had been massively depopulated in the 16th century, mostly due to massive pandemic mortality due to natives having no immune defenses against diseases they were exposed to by the first explorers.
Indeed, the Indians had aggressively managed their environments on a vast scale, using fire to burn away excessive tree and understory growth to support both crop production as well as support populations of hunted animals. They planted and grew specific tree types in groves, and built complex large scale infrastructure (cities, roads, mounds, pyramids, irrigation and drainage ditches, reservoirs, and they cleared vast areas of land for agriculture).
But when 90+% of the natives in the Americas disappeared in the 16th century, mostly due to pandemics, nature literally took over again and remade the landscape that Euro settlers later encountered a century or two centuries later. Not only did the forests grow back, but animal populations exploded, from passenger pigeons to buffalo and elk whose pre-Columbian pandemics their populations were kept in check by the indigenous peoples. Cities were built throughout the Americas that featured populations in the thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, rivaling or even exceeding the largest cities in Europe at that time. Those kinds of concentrated population centers of course were inevitably polluting to the environment (absent modern pollution control technology), and also required vast areas of cultivated fields to feed the populations.
This “lost civilization” model has been found true not only with the obvious civilizations well reported by the Spanish, like the Aztecs and Maya in MesoAmerica, but even in what is now considered impenetrable rain forests in the Amazon basin. It’s just that we’ve only been discovering this ancient infrastructure in recent decades due to improved remote sensing such as via airborne LIDAR surveys, and by extensive on-the-ground archaeological digs.
I’m sorry, let me say it again.
If you go back to a time before the 15th century beginnings of colonisation from Europe, you could argue that the indigenous did not know about LNG and certainly didn’t need it to survive.
Nothing you listed was remotely relevant.
I suspect Duane hit reply to you by mistake
Who else would he be replying to, Redge?
—
Nope – see my response to strativarious
Reading comprehension seems to be a challenge here.
No need for that, Duane, had you quoted Strat in the first place (as you have below), your comment would have been clearer.
Your comment could easily have been a good stand-alone comment.
I quote you:
So everything I wrote above is totally relevant to what you wrote.
I did not disagree with you, I amplified why “fans of indigenous peoples untainted by the awful modern world” have no idea what they are talking about.
I do not understand why you taking issue with my comment.
Also most indigenous people moved south to keep warm. They favored climate change.
The North Sentinelese kill on sight
But they do have ‘green’ bows and arrows. So, it’s a kind of Carbon neutral kill.
“North Sentinel island”
There’s a number of Congress-persons that I’d like to see form an investigative committee to visit the island. The islanders really know how to welcome visitors.
An old slogan:
Energy is life; cheap energy is prosperity.
” 88 environmental groups and other organizations recently demanded an end to LNG”
I guess the Mexican Cartels need to get up north and get things right like they have it
here in MT. No to LNG and yes to fentanyl. /s
In BC, You’ve got separate “first nations” tribes, elected elders, hereditary elders, cat ladies, gun-toting terrorists, lawyers out for a buck, woke hippy law firms pleading for donations to fight virtually any development, bleeding heart “we-stole-their-land” types, tree-huggers, albino bear lovers, save-the-Salmon/Dolphins/Whales types, even save the fish farms types, and many other special interest groups involved. Worse, the gov’t uses taxpayer money to pick up their legal bills, and there is an entire legal industry around Indigenous claims for land, loss of history, tradition, language, culture, even something called “cultural genocide” along with requests for more medical clinics, cat scanners, and such. These various forces converge on a basic point of agreement of asking for more money or costly “stuff” until just about any project is economically unviable.
DMacK,
Fundamentally, there is no reason why people born in a certain place should have or need to have any “granted” interest in natural gas resources.
When a new natural project starts to emerge, authority for it to proceed comes lawfully and procedurally from the designated government – that is there to represent all people, not special interest groups. By law, the “ownership” of the gas resides with a government.
During development and operation of the gas project, all people are equally able to offer their credentials and if good enough, become employees and so gain some more direct benefit than the benefit public.
There really is no case for aboriginal groups, in Canada or in my native Australia, to have any special status. When they were the lone occupants was before migrants arrived (itself a complicated story) there was no evidence of their knowledge of gas or indeed of most natural resources now exploited on a large scale, so there is no basis for special treatment other than special pleading that resembles begging because of laziness to get educated, working, producing, integrating into the community that is everywhere around them. Lately, activist aboriginal groups are a social complication of lazy people sucking at the teat of handout money fiddled by even more lazy administrators, regulators and legislators. The mentality of their work resembles being paid to give rewards to children for sucking their thumbs.
Simple, valid perspectives are being overwhelmed by such lazy people whose main function is trying to tell normal people what they can or cannot do. Normal people who are smarter and more productive do not ask for this social meddling and if like me, look forward to the day when these folk stop sucking their own thumbs and get useful.
I mean no disrespect towards the many citizens of aboriginal extract who have integrated into society as it evolved and care not to play the race card. Geoff S
sherro01
Astute comments.
with those who favor common sense over ideology
======
The Prime Minister of Canada, having spent 6 months as an impressionable exchange student in China, knows better than the First Nation’s what is good for them.
I thought he had spent time in Cuba. Whoops, my bad. That was his mother.
The Canadian government is doing everything in its power and more to kill LNG development.
The Laurentian Elite of Eastern Canada control 90% of the economy and are not about to allow Western Canada a seat at the table.
To this day eastern Canada imports hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign oil rather than buying oil from western Canada, then wonders why their economy needs government handouts. Vote buying paid for by the very voters they are buying.
Note how these environmental organizations who want to halt natural gas development and exports didn’t bother to consult with the First Nations who have been benefiting from it, but after all, who knows what’s best for the general public than these eco-loons. They’re the ones that are trying to force EVs and heat pumps on the populace as well as restricting air travel, the sale of red meat, fossil fuel consumption, and anything that improves living standards worldwide. So why should economically challenged First Nations communities be exempt from benefiting from anything that is ruining the planet? But as asinine as these proposals sound, the current Canadian government wants to continue pretending it’s on board to fight climate change. Ironically since Canadian oil sands emissions keep rising and consumers repeatedly show they don’t consider reaching Net Zero to be achievable or particularly important, the country’s Liberal party still doesn’t get the message.
Edward,
How do you justify special concessions for these “First Nations” (choke, choke) people just because they were born in the place before other people?
Did they gain an interest in resources like natural gas because they found and used it and put themselves in a position to trade it for profit, like others do?
You seem to be arguing a flimsy line that they deserve special favour because they do not say as many silly tings as do some other community parts.
Geoff S
Vijay, another excellent article! That you took the trouble to learn all those complex names of Canadian First Nations is unusual for even an investigative reporter. It also characterizes your attention to detail in all other aspects of your reportage and analyses. Always a good read.
While I would accept all the help we can get straightening out this CAGW mess it is not about jobs or race or poverty or who was here first. It is about developing reliable, affordable and accessible energy for everyone. Wind and solar are not the answer that much is clear. We need to get busy building energy infrastructure that works. Those standing in the way need to move on you are not helping.
The only solution is a new government and Trudeau removed forever.