Status Quo Sorrows: The Failures of Energy Project Consultations and Reconciliatory Paths Forward

Canada’s prevailing Aboriginal consultation regime for major energy projects is not working. Indeed, Indigenous peoples, industry proponents, and the Crown have all expressed increasing frustration and dismay at the uncertainty and acrimony that a legal regime intended to facilitate reconciliation between Canada and Indigenous peoples has counterproductively generated. In this paper, I describe the underlying principles of a process-oriented reconciliation that animate the Court’s jurisprudence on section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. I then identify the failures in effectively translating these principles to the major energy context, focusing in particular on the harms generated by the lack of accountability and transparency of the National Energy Board/Canada Energy Regulator administrative scheme. I finally consider two alternatives or additions to contemporary resource project consultations – namely, Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBAs) and a proposed Indigenous veto – finding that an Indigenous veto may be an especially effective means of introducing greater equity, fairness, and certainty to major energy project development in Canada, to the benefit of all relevant stakeholders.

The geography of skill: Mobility and exclusionary unionism in Canada’s north

This paper explores the spatial politics of racism and inter-worker competition through a case study of Indigenous employment during the construction of the Voisey’s Bay mine in northern Labrador. Over the course of construction, the building and construction trades unions (BCTUs) sought to restrict the hiring of local Inuit and Innu workers by challenging the legitimacy of place-based entitlements to work. Inuit and Innu workers had preferential access to employment as a result of unresolved land claims and the ensuing Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBA) between the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company and both the Innu Nation and the Labrador Inuit Association. IBA provisions that local Inuit and Innu be hired preferentially ran counter to the unions’ organizational structures and cultures, which privileged worker mobility and skill. The BCTUs used the geographic incompatibility between the scale of Indigenous claims and that of construction worker organization to justify a competitive approach to unionism and to veil racist portrayals of Innu and Inuit workers. By drawing out the relation between skill, racism and beliefs about entitlements to work, this paper explores how workers selectively use place-based and mobile identities to participate in inter-worker competition, reifying colonial patterns of labour mobility and labour market segmentation.