Canada’s largest private-sector union has thrown its support behind First Nations in opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline project, vowing to hit picket lines in solidarity if the project goes ahead. Unifor, formed on Labour Day weekend with the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, now has more than 300,000 members across the country.
In December 2010, First Nations across BC and Alberta came together in a show of unprecedented solidarity to stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline by signing the Save the Fraser Declaration. Representatives of over 130 First Nations throughout BC and Canada are now signatories to this powerful legal document that protects the lands and waters we all rely on from devastating oil spills for all people and all generations. This is the critical time to show that citizens of British Columbia and Canada stand with First Nations to hold this wall.
COAST SALISH TERRITORY – Activists blocked access to the federal Port of Vancouver for an hour early this morning as part of an International Day of Action in Support of Elsipogtog Land Defenders in New Brunswick. Access to the Port at the foot of Clark Drive was blocked for an hour. Traffic was backed up as far as as the eye could see.
On a cold and overcast morning, approximately 50 people gathered outside the RCMP station at the University of BC in Vancouver to denounce the RCMP assaults on Mi'kmaq in New Brunswick and to stand in solidarity with the struggle against fracking. Members of the Musqueam nation, along with UBC students and anarchists from East Vancouver, participated in the rally.
There are more than 600 major resource projects worth $650-billion planned in Western Canada over the next decade but relations with First Nations may be a major hurdle for those developments, says a new report by the Fraser Institute. Every one of those projects will affect at least one First Nations community, said the report released Thursday by the right-leaning think tank based in Vancouver.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Nov. 28, 2013) - Oil and gas development can help lower the unemployment rate among First Nations, bring prosperity to remote communities, and benefit all Canadians, says a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank. The study, Opportunities for First Nation prosperity through oil and gas development, notes that over the next decade, an estimated 600 major resource projects worth approximately $650 billion are planned for Canada.
Rosa Parks famously occupied the seat of a Montgomery bus, an action that sparked a revolution in U.S. racial relations. The Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en now defiantly occupies territory whose location is critical to a proposed new pipeline route. They experience daily surveillance by helicopters that sometimes buzz close over the main cabin of the occupation.
Ten years ago, the provincial government made the welcome decision to provide greater opportunities for First Nations to participate in and benefit from forestry operations in British Columbia. The result was a flurry of new resource and revenue sharing agreements between the government and numerous First Nations that underscored the government’s commitment to enter a “new relationship” with the province’s First Peoples.
A lawsuit the Coldwater Indian Band filed against Kinder Morgan could set precedent for a series of other legal battles, said both the pipeline company’s lawyers and an environmental lawyer. Matthew Kirchner, who is defending the band, argued on Wednesday that Kinder Morgan was illegally operating the Trans Mountain pipeline on the reserve. Coldwater is seeking a judicial review of an assignment to a right-of-way that Kinder Morgan has applied for to expand the pipeline’s production three-fold by twinning it.
First Nations fear they are being cut out of a potential $2.5 billion windfall from the development of B.C.'s liquefied natural gas and mining sector and want the provincial government to mandate at least a quarter of those projects to use energy from B.C.'s independent power producers.
