No Wealth, No Justice in $1 Billion LNG Offer to First Nation Band
Here’s why Lax Kw’alaams still side with the salmon.
Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and writer known for his work among the poor and the excluded, is credited with coining a phrase that is as true as any you’ll ever hear: ”The opposite of poverty is not wealth — it is justice.”
It is a phrase that has also been attributed to Bryan Stevenson, founder of America’s Equal Justice Initiative and a man Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called, without qualification, ”America’s Nelson Mandela.”
Regardless of the provenance of the expression, it is the potency of the underlying idea that should be freighted into the unseemly scramble to unlock northern British Columbia’s dangerously exaggerated liquefied natural gas (LNG) bonanza, especially now that some coastal First Nations are bellying up to the pipe to get their overdue share of Canada’s resource riches.
To read reports emanating from the mouth of the Skeena River, the energy sector thinks it has finally cracked the nut on how to successfully partner with First Nations people who, inconveniently, stand afore a variety of proposed LNG plants and pipeline deals. These aboriginal people have rights along the planned pipeline routes, and also at tidewater, where Canada is trying to unstopper our oil and gas supplies so the Chinese can drain off our energy sovereignty like so much bilge water.
Industry’s latest poster child is the Lax Kw’alaams Band, whose main village at Port Simpson is situated on the coast north of Prince Rupert, where the waters of the Skeena and the Nass rivers mingle and nurse some of the finest wild salmon populations left on the planet.
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