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Pour a coffee, because this one’s got some plumbing to it. Ottawa is trying to move faster on big projects — pipelines, mines, the works — and the country’s largest Indigenous political organization is telling the prime minister, politely but pointedly, to slow down.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has introduced Bill C-39, legislation meant to compress the review-and-approval process for major infrastructure projects toward a single federal decision within roughly one year, according to the Globe and Mail, which reported the bill this week. Carney has framed the push as removing what he called “well-meaning” restrictions that have piled up over decades, and has said the goal is “building inclusively with Indigenous peoples,” including new options for Indigenous ownership stakes in the projects themselves.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak isn’t buying the timeline. “One year’s tight,” she told the Globe and Mail, arguing that meaningful consultation with First Nations communities can’t be run on a stopwatch. Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson countered that Ottawa has “learned a lot” over the past year about how to “build in the right way” since standing up the federal Major Projects Office.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, because this isn’t just a debate about paperwork — there’s real money and a real pipeline sitting in the middle of it. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has sent letters to First Nations along the Trans Mountain pipeline route offering a combined 15 percent equity stake in the Crown-owned project, according to the Globe and Mail‘s reporting this week. The offer touches some 129 First Nations along the route, plus the 36-member Western Indigenous Pipeline Group that has spent years organizing to buy into the pipeline outright.
The reaction from Indigenous leaders and advisers has been anything but a simple thank-you. “It’s a feeble attempt at economic reconciliation for the First Nations,” said Stephen Buffalo, president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council, in comments reported by the Globe and Mail. Dawn Mills, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia advising on Indigenous equity deals, warned that the dollar value attached to the offer “would quickly be eaten up by legal fees” in the negotiations to come.
So you’ve got two threads of the same rope: a bill that would put a clock on how long Ottawa can take to say yes to a project, and an equity offer meant to bring First Nations in as owners rather than bystanders — landing in the same week, on the same pipeline file, from the same government. Trans Mountain, remember, is the pipeline Ottawa bought outright in 2018 rather than see it collapse under provincial and legal opposition; the federal government has been openly weighing how and when to sell it back to private hands ever since it finished the expansion.
None of this is settled. Bill C-39 still has to clear Parliament, which returned from its summer break this week facing a packed fall agenda. The equity proposal is, by all accounts, an opening letter, not a signed deal — and the number of hands that need to agree to it, across 129 nations and a pipeline consortium, is its own kind of timeline problem. What’s clear is that federal-provincial relations aren’t the only fault line running through this country’s energy politics right now. There’s a second one, just as old, running straight through Ottawa’s relationship with the nations whose land the pipes and the projects actually cross.
