By Joel Connelly | seattlepi.com
A native band in northern British Columbia has voted to reject a $1.15 billion (Canadian), 40-year payout from a consortium of Asian and North American energy companies that want to cross its land with a pipeline and build a liquefied natural gas terminal.
The action by the Lax Kw’alaams came after meetings in their village, Price Rupert and Vancouver saw near-unanimous opposition from the 3,600-member Aboriginal First Nation band.
“Not every election has a price tag,” Tamo Campos, a young environmentalist from the B.C. north, wrote on his Facebook page.
Garry Reece, mayor of the band’s village, said in a statement: “Hopefully the public will recognize that unanimous consensus in communities (and where unanimity is the exception) against a project where those communities are offered in excess of a billion dollars, sends an unequivocal message this is not a money issue: This is environmental and cultural.”
The group Pacific NorthWest LNG has proposed a $36 billion (Canadian) project that would include a pipeline terminus and liquified natural gas shipment terminal near the Lax Kw’alaams’ remote village.
The company is headed by Malaysia’s state-owned Petronas with other investors that include Shell Oil, Chevron, China Petrochemical Corp, Japan Petroleum Exploration Co. and the Indian Oil Corp.
The British Columbia government has promised and promoted LNG exports as an economic panacea, with 19 proposed projects up and down the B.C. Coast. Two huge proposed oil export terminals — at Kitimat in northern B.C., and Burnaby, next door to Vancouver — are also under evaluation.
The Pacific NorthWest LNG project has been described as “a significant deal, a serious deal” by John Rustad, B.C.’s aboriginal affairs minister.
B.C. Premier Christy Clark predicted Monday that an agreement between Pacific NorthWest LNG and the Lax Kw’alaams will eventually be worked out. The Indian band is no stranger to trans-Pacific commerce. It makes money exporting raw logs to Asia.
But the energy industry’s heavy hand is generating significant backlash in British Columbia.
A proposed natural gas pipeline would go directly under the Nisga’a Memorial Lava Bed Park, beneath which 2,000 Nisga’a Band members were entombed by a volcanic eruption more than 250 years ago.
The LNG terminal would be adjacent to the estuaries of the Skeena and Nass rivers, famous salmon streams. The Nass is a rare example in Canada where the federal government and Aboriginal First Nations have cooperated to rebuild a flourishing fishery.
In southern British Columbia, the proposed expansion of the TransMountain Pipeline, an oil pipeline project proposed by Houston-based Kinder Morgan, could bore through four provincial parks and go under popular Burnaby Mountain Park.
Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and then released, in protests last November against Kinder Morgan’s exploratory drilling.
The Lax Kw’alaams have objected to disruption of Flora Bank, an estuary of eel grass vital to the maturation of young salmon before they go out into the ocean.
Pacific NorthWest LNG has offered to build a suspension bridge over the eel grass, and has plied the native band with offers of economic development and jobs.
The Supreme Court of Canada has recently granted Aboriginal First Nations expanded powers over their ancestral hunting, fishing and gathering grounds.
At the same time, however, the Canadian federal government has severely scaled back the environmental review of major energy projects. Provinces can, according to the high court ruling, exercise power to override native groups’ opposition when vital interests are deemed at stake.
The rejection of the $1.15 billion deal is still a landmark in the Great White North.
“The stern resolve of the people of Lax Kw’alaams is of a piece with their ancients’ history, and in standing up for their rights, they’re making modern history, too,” journalist Ian Gill wrote in The Tyee, a Vancouver-based news web site.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2015/05/13/native-band-in-canada-rejects-1-15-billion-inducement-from-gas-pipeline-buildernatural/
