In 2025, a tanker left Kitimat, British Columbia, carrying Canada’s first-ever cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) bound for Asia as an opening move in Ottawa’s plan to double what Canada sells outside the United States within a decade. The move also represented progress in Canada’s reputation, in what Business Council of Canada President, Trevor Kennedy, characterized as a “drive-by shooting,” rather than as the Indo-Pacific Strategy’s “reliable supplier” objective.

What received less notice is that the cargo came from a facility on Haisla Nation territory, near to the Haisla Nation majority-owned Cedar LNG. The Haisla Nation made history as the first majority-owned LNG facility in the world. Canada’s export success in the Asia-Pacific does not merely coexist with Indigenous partnership, it depends on it, by the land on which it stands and exporting facilities alike.

Ottawa should move beyond partnering with individual Indigenous businesses to nation-building exercises. It should embed Indigenous advisory councils, like those at the Major Projects Office, across every geographic team at Global Affairs Canada (GAC), informing trade agreements, economic partnerships and security engagements alike. However, the sequence matters as much as the structure of this fundamental foreign policy change.

Before any council is set up, Ottawa must hold genuine, country-wide engagement with First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders to co-design the mandate, membership and authority of these bodies. That authority needs to mean more than a seat at the table after a decision is drafted: it should give councils a formal, early checkpoint capable of pausing or redirecting a position before it reaches negotiating partners, not just a chance to react to one already set. The institutions follow from co-development, guided by principles surfaced through the process of engagement, such as cognitive empathy in conflict resolution, mutual respect among equal-footed partners and decision-making oriented toward intergenerational stewardship.

Indigenous Commitments Intertwine with Canada’s Economic Security: The Evidence of Need

Why is this necessary? Canada’s policymaking structure has not caught up with its commitments to its own rule-making order.........

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