The Dominion - lubicon

What if Natives Stop Subsidizing Canada?

Tim McSorley — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:01:13 +0000

This piece was originally posted on the Media Co-op. For more #IdleNoMore coverage, click here.

MONTREAL—There is a prevailing myth that Canada's more than 600 First Nations and native communities live off of money—subsidies—from the Canadian government. This myth, though it is loudly proclaimed and widely believed, is remarkable for its boldness; widely accessible, verifiable facts show that the opposite is true.

Indigenous people have been subsidizing Canada for a very long time.

Conservatives have leaked documents in an attempt to discredit chief Theresa Spence, currently on hunger strike in Ottawa. Reporters like Jeffrey Simpson and Christie Blatchford have ridiculed the demands of native leaders and the protest movement Idle No More. Their ridicule rests on this foundational untruth: that it is hard-earned tax dollars of Canadians that pays for housing, schools and health services in First Nations. The myth carries a host of racist assumptions on its back. It enables prominent voices like Simpson and Blatchford to liken protesters' demands to "living in a dream palace" or "horse manure," respectively.

It's true that Canada's federal government controls large portions of the cash flow First Nations depend on. Much of the money used by First Nations to provide services does come from the federal budget. But the accuracy of the myth ends there.

On the whole, the money that First Nations receive is a small fraction of the value of the resources, and the government revenue that comes out of their territories. Let's look a few examples.

Barriere Lake

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake have a traditional territory that spans 10,000 square kilometres. For thousands of years, they have made continuous use of the land. They have never signed a treaty giving up their rights to the land. An estimated $100 million per year in revenues are extracted every year from their territory in the form of logging, hydroelectric dams, and recreational hunting and fishing.

And yet the community lives in third-world conditions. A diesel generator provides power, few jobs are available, and families live in dilapidated bungalows. These are not the lifestyles of a community with a $100 million economy in its back yard. In some cases, governments are willing to spend lavishly. They spared no expense, for example, sending 50 fully-equipped riot police from Montreal to break up a peaceful road blockade with tear gas and physical coercion.

Barriere Lake is subsidizing the logging industry, Canada, and Quebec.

The community isn't asking for the subsidies to stop, just for some jobs and a say in how their traditional territories are used. They've been fighting for these demands for decades.

Attawapiskat

Attawapiskat has been in the news because their ongoing housing crisis came to the attention of the media in 2011 (MP Charlie Angus referred to the poverty-stricken community as "Haiti at 40 below"). More recently, Chief Theresa Spence has made headlines for her ongoing hunger strike. The community is near James Bay, in Ontario's far north.

Right now, DeBeers is constructing a $1 billion mine on the traditional territory of the Āhtawāpiskatowi ininiwak. Anticipated revenues will top $6.7 billion. Currently, the Conservative government is subjecting the budget of the Cree to extensive scrutiny. But the total amount transferred to the First Nation since 2006—$90 million—is a little more than one percent of the anticipated mine revenues. As a percentage, that's a little over half of Harper's cut to GST.

Royalties from the mine do not go to the First Nation, but straight to the provincial government. The community has received some temporary jobs in the mine, and future generations will have to deal with the consequences of a giant open pit mine in their back yard.

Attawapiskat is subsidizing DeBeers, Canada and Ontario.

Lubicon

The Lubicon Cree, who never signed a treaty ceding their land rights, have waged a decades-long campaign for land rights. During this time, over $14 billion in oil and gas has been removed from their traditional territory. During the same period, the community has gone without running water, endured divisive attacks from the government, and suffered the environmental consequences of unchecked extraction.

Sour gas flaring next to the community resulted in an epidemic of health problems, and stillborn babies. Moose and other animals fled the area, rendering the community's previously self-sufficient lifestyle untenable overnight. In 2011, an oil pipeline burst, spilling 4.5 million litres of oil onto Lubicon territory. The Lubicon remain without a treaty, and the extraction continues.

The Lubicon Cree are subsidizing the oil and gas sector, Alberta and Canada.

What will Canada do without its subsidies?

From the days of beaver trapping to today's aspirations of becoming an energy superpower, Canada's economy has always been based on natural resources. With 90% of its settler population amassed along the southern border, exploitation of the land's wealth almost always happens at the expense of the Indigenous population.

Canada's economy could not have been build without massive subsidies: of land, resource wealth, and the incalculable cost of generations of suffering.

Overall numbers are difficult to pin down, but consider the following: Canadian governments received $9 billion in taxes and royalties in 2011 from mining companies, which is a tiny portion of overall mining profits; $3.8 billion came from exports of hydroelectricity alone in 2008, and 60 per cent of Canada's electricity comes from hydroelectric dams; one estimate has tar sands extraction bringing in $1.2 trillion in royalties over 35 years; the forestry industry was worth $38.2 billion in 2006, and contributes billions in royalties and taxes.

By contrast, annual government spending on First Nations is $5.36 billion, which comes to about $7,200 per person. By contrast, per capita government spending in Ottawa is around $14,900. By any reasonable measure, it's clear that First Nations are the ones subsidizing Canada. (2005 figures; the amount is slightly higher today.)

These industries are mostly take place on an Indigenous nation's traditional territory, laying waste to the land in the process, submerging, denuding, polluting and removing. The human costs are far greater; brutal tactics aimed at erasing native peoples' identity and connection with the land have created human tragedies several generations deep and a legacy of fierce and principled resistance that continues today.

Canada has developed myriad mechanisms to keep the pressure on and the resources flowing. But policies of large-scale land theft and subordination of peoples are not disposed to half measures. From the active violence of residential schools to the targetted neglect of underfunded reserve schools, from RCMP and armed forces rifles to provincial police tear gas canisters, the extraction of these subsidies has always been treated like a game of Risk, but with real consequences.

Break the treaty, press the advantage, and don't let a weaker player rebuild.

Idle? Know More.

The last residential school was shut down in 1996. Canadians today would like to imagine themselves more humane than past generations, but few can name the Indigenous nations of this land or the treaties that allow Canada and Canadians to exist.

Understanding the subsidies native people give to Canada is just the beginning. Equally crucial is understanding the mechanisms by which the government forces native people to choose every day between living conditions out of a World Vision advertisement and hopelessness on one hand, and the pollution and social problems of short-term resource exploitation projects on the other.

Empathy and remorse are great reasons to act to dismantle this ugly system of expropriation. But an even better reason is that Indigenous nations present the best and only partners in taking care of our environment. Protecting our rivers, lakes, forests and oceans is best done by people with a multi-millenial relationship with the land.

As the people who live downstream and downwind, and who have an ongoing relationship to the land, Cree, Dene, Anishnabe, Inuit, Ojibway and other nations are among the best placed and most motivated to slow down and stop the industrial gigaprojects that are threatening all of our lives.

Movements like Idle No More give a population asleep at the wheel the chance to wake up and hear what native communities have been saying for hundreds of years: it's time to withdraw our consent from this dead end regime, and chart a new course.

Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer, Media Co-op co-founder. Co-author of Paved with Good Intentions and Offsetting Resistance.

Barriere Lake Protest

DeBeers Victor Mine

A New Wave of Exploitation

dru — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:55:08 +0000

Canada, Alberta defy UN, sell off rights to disputed Lubicon land

United Nations officials were visibly perturbed when the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights met in a conference room in Geneva last year to consider the long-standing land rights dispute between the Lubicon Lake Indian Nation and the governments of Canada and Alberta.

Just seven months earlier, the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) had re-affirmed a 1990 ruling that found Canada was violating the Lubicon people's human rights and told the Canadian government to negotiate a land rights settlement with the northern Alberta based First Nation. The Committee had also ruled that Canada "should consult with the Band before granting licences for economic exploitation of the disputed land, and ensure that in no case such exploitation jeopardizes the rights recognized under the [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights]."

In the seven months following the October 2005 UNHRC decision, the Alberta government ignored the ruling entirely. Without so much as a courtesy call to the Lubicon Nation, Alberta sold conventional oil and gas leases and exploration licences to over 65,000 hectares of Lubicon Traditional Territory, approved 50 new oil and gas wells and approved almost 50 new pipelines on Lubicon lands.

Then, as UN officials gathered in May 2006 to review the Lubicon case, Alberta announced over 50,000 hectares of Lubicon territory would be put on the auction block for new tar sands exploitation without notifying or consulting the Lubicon people.

Upon wrapping up the hearings, the UN officials issued a sharply-worded ruling again, pushing Canada to resolve the dispute and consult with the Lubicon people before issuing new leases or licenses on their lands.

The Canadian and Albertan governments have done neither.

The Lubicon Lake people are an Indigenous Nation of approximately 500 people living near Peace River in northern Alberta, Canada. They have never surrendered their rights to their Traditional Territory in any legally or historically recognized way. When a treaty was negotiated with other Indigenous peoples in the region in 1899, treaty negotiators never travelled inland to Lubicon territory and they were therefore left out of the treaty process. Even by its own Constitutionally-enshrined process, Canada has never secured rights to the lands in dispute.

Despite the unresolved land rights – which in any society that valued the rule of law should have given pause to further encroachment – Lubicon Traditional Territory has been ravaged by multi-billion dollar resource exploitation activity including logging and large-scale oil and gas extraction. Over $13 billion in oil and gas resources have been taken from their lands. By 2002, over 1,700 oil and gas well sites and countless kilometres of pipelines were situated within Lubicon Traditional Territory.

These massive resource exploitation activities have decimated the Traditional Lubicon hunting and trapping economy and way of life, and threaten the very existence of the Lubicon Lake People as a distinct Indigenous society. With the onset of resource exploitation has come terrible social and health problems which the Lubicon people never had to face before, such as asthma and other respiratory problems, cancers of all kinds, skin diseases and miscarriages.

Although the Lubicon people have fought for years to establish a modern treaty with Canada that would provide them with reserve lands, basic amenities like running water and decent housing, a new economy and some control over environmental and wildlife matters in their Traditional lands, Canada has let the situation deteriorate further. Canada has not sent a negotiator to the table since December 2003.

The Alberta government, for its part, has further exploited the lack of a land rights settlement by opening up the area for "heavy oil" exploitation in recent years.

"Heavy Oil" is a nicer-sounding word for tar sands that, when heated, can be extracted through oil wells rather than strip-mined.

Since the province of Alberta began promoting the exploitation of tar sands in the area, huge operations have sprung up downwind and downstream from the Lubicon community despite Lubicon objections. And beginning in 2004, a number of companies proposed to begin large-scale "heavy oil" extraction projects on 63-square miles right in the heart of Lubicon Territory immediately adjacent to proposed Lubicon reserve lands and surrounding two lakes upon which they rely for fish. These companies plan to drill 512 "heavy oil" wells in this sensitive area, ultimately producing an estimated 820 million barrels of oil.

The 50,000 hectares of tar-sands auctioned off while the Lubicons were at the UN were in addition to these prior developments. And this year another 15,500 hectares just north of the proposed Lubicon reserve lands have been sold to tar sands companies.

Liquefying the "heavy oil" so it can be pumped out of the ground is done with superheated water or steam and typically requires that 3 to 6 barrels of water be injected into the subsurface for each barrel of oil produced. Most, if not all, of this water is taken out of the natural cycle and lost forever. Where this huge volume of water will come from and the environmental consequences of injecting it in to the fragile boreal subsurface are unknown. Some years ago, an experimental heavy oil/tar sands facility to the west of the Lubicons built a pipeline to a neighboring lake to obtain the water they required. Within a few months they had drained the lake so far that it froze solid in the winter, killing all the fish.

Until recently, it was also unclear how the huge energy needs of this process could be sustained by the companies in the area. Now a new company has announced plans to build a nuclear reactor near Peace River to power tar sands exploitation, claiming that 70 per cent of their power output will go to fuel a major tar sands project in the region.

This new tar sands boom in the Peace River area has the potential to be even more damaging than the first wave of resource exploitation in the early 1980s.

The Lubicon people suffered the full environmental, economic, cultural, social and health impacts of that first wave of conventional oil and gas exploitation in their unceded territory.

With a new wave of even more damaging resource exploitation arriving at their doorstep, the Lubicon people are bracing for the worst. Reckless water use, oil spills, further degradation of the groundwater, increased toxic emissions, further decimation of fisheries and wildlife, more roads, trucking, seismic lines and the spectre of nuclear waste haunt their future.

A better future is possible. The United Nations committee identified two easy steps towards that future--negotiations and consultation.

But that would require that Canadian governments listen to the UN rather than openly flaunting their rulings and selling off the very lands and resources that are under dispute even as the UN is hearing the matter.

Kevin Thomas is the Chief Negotiator for the Lubicon Lake Indian Nation

Lubicon Territory

No Lifeblood for Oil

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:25:12 +0000

Lubicon nation fights oil companies, governments for survival

Photos: OLS

Near the town of Peace River in northern Alberta is the 10,000 square kilometer Lubicon Lake First Nation traditional territory -- home to about 500 Crees. When the abundance of resources -- in particular, heavy oil -- became apparent on Lubicon traditional territory, the Alberta provincial government began to sell the resource rights to multinational corporations. The exploitation of the unceded territory of the Lubicon Lake First Nation continues unabated. By 2002, over 1,700 well sites and several kilometers of pipelines had been constructed on Lubicon land. In August 2004, Alberta granted oil sands exploration leases to Calgary-based Deep Well Oil and Gas reported to encompass over 101 square kilometers in Lubicon traditional territory. The development has not been without impact on the Lubicon.

A short time ago the Lubicon subsisted from the land. The Ottawa-based group Outaouais Lubicon Solidarity describes the change: "Between 1979 and 1983, annual trapping income dropped 90%. The number of moose killed for food dropped 90% and the number of people on welfare jumped from 10% to over 90%."

They say the federal and Alberta governments are complicit in undermining the Lubicon Lake First Nation.

The Alberta government, says the group, rejected the Lubicon land registry claim, denied the Lubicon nation's existence, belittled the Lubicon as "merely squatters on provincial Crown land" without aboriginal rights, declared the Lubicon community at Little Buffalo to be "an official provincial hamlet," threatened to bulldoze Lubicon homes (but later backed down), sent in RCMP to forcibly dismantle Lubicon barricades on their territory, negotiated the size of a Lubicon reserve in the Grimshaw Accord, and then backed out of the accord.

The federal government has taken similar actions. They are accused of manipulating the Lubicon Band membership list, negotiating by "take-it-or-leave-it" offer, suppressing a federal inquiry report favourable to the Lubicon, resorting to chicanery in Lubicon elections, and financing clear-cut logging operations by neighboring bands within Lubicon traditional territory.

Criticism of the governments' respective roles abounds. The World Council of Churches decried the potential "genocidal consequences" of actions by the Alberta provincial government and oil corporations. The Canadian government was urged to take "immediate action."

In 1987, the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked Canada "to take interim measures of protection to avoid irreparable damage" to the Lubicon Lake First Nation while it investigated. In March 1990, the commission declared that "recent developments threaten the way of life and culture of the Lubicon Lake Cree and constitute a violation of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights..."

The federal government's own Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) concluded the solution to First Nations' territorial woes was simple: they required a greater share of the lands and resources to survive.

In 1998, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights iterated the RCAP solution and urged "concrete and urgent steps to restore" land and resources to Original Peoples.

Amnesty International was alarmed and demanded respect for Canada's Original Peoples. Scandal-plagued Prime Minister Paul Martin gave his assurance of being "committed to a just settlement of this [Lubicon] land claim …"

Kevin Thomas, a negotiator with the Lubicon Lake First Nation responded, "It's not the first time that we've heard that. Every PM for the last twenty years has said it. … Obviously we're a little cynical when someone makes that statement and doesn't back it up with action."

Deep Well Oil and Gas, Surge Global Energy, Welwyn Resources, and Paradigm Oil and Gas have announced a plan to extract almost 820 million barrels of oil through as many as 512 wells in Lubicon territory. The Lubicon Lake First Nation with environmental NGOs Sierra Club of Canada and Greenpeace asked Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion to initiate a federal environmental review of the oil sands project.

Lubicon Chief Bernard Ominayak said "We believe that it is irresponsible to allow this development to proceed without first dealing with the unresolved jurisdictional issues regarding these lands and without an independent assessment of the environmental, social and economic impacts of this project."

Ominayak expressed concern about harm to the lake fisheries, the depletion and contamination of water resources, and the unknown impacts of massive steam injections into the sensitive boreal muskeg ecosystem.

The effects of potential air pollution, litter, contaminated wastes, and climate change on the flora and fauna, culture, and Lubicon "way of life" were also pressing concerns cited by Ominayak.

Deep Well and its associates, have so far been unresponsive to Lubicon requests for discussion except briefly in response to a Lubicon blockade that reportedly cost the companies $100,000 a day.

In a late response to The Dominion, Deep Well said that "Legal
ownership and beneficial title to the land involved is with the Province of
Alberta."

Thomas paraphrased the Lubicon resistance to co-optation: "Oil companies typically think they can wave some money around and people will jump. The Lubicon community needs money; they don't even have running water at this point. But their first question isn't how much money they can make -- it's what's this going to do to their land and their way of life."

Ominayak's message is urgent: "I hope people will understand we're trying to survive from day to day and need all the help we can get from the general public. It's a battle against time."

In northern Alberta, the Lubicon nation is fighting oil companies and provincial and federal governments for their way of life, writes Kim Petersen.