They still don’t get it. Almost 10 years ago, after the Northern Gateway pipeline’s approval was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal because of the federal government’s failure to properly consult First Nations, the oil and gas industry and their political proxies have yet to learn its key lesson. Rather than trying to understand what the court was saying, they instead retconned its ruling into a purely political decision Justin Trudeau made to deliberately frustrate their economic ambitions — and dined out on that for a decade. The bill for that meal is about to come due, though, because they’re about to make the same mistake with the next proposed oil pipeline to the north coast that they made with the first. 

It’s instructive to return to the ruling that actually killed Gateway. "We find that Canada offered only a brief, hurried and inadequate opportunity … to exchange and discuss information and to dialogue," it said. The industry and its political allies failed to understand at the time that physical geography is far less important than political geography in that part of British Columbia, where unceded Indigenous title and the Supreme Court’s clear inclination towards upholding it is a far bigger obstacle than mountains or rivers. 

That part of the lesson, at least, appeared to be at least partially learned. When the CBC reported on the proposed routes being floated by the Alberta government, they seemed to take stock of the communities along the way and their economic and political interests. As the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Heather Exner-Pirot wrote on social media, “this seems optimized for favourable Indigenous territory rather than for technical or economic factors. … [T]he options are heavy on Nisg̱a’a [pipeline routes], which makes me think engagements have been positive with them.”

Apparently not, according to an official statement from the Nisg̱a’a........

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