Aboriginal role in resources to grow
Industry must manage relationships with First Nations, new report says
Canada’s aboriginal peoples will play an increasingly crucial role in the resource industries and getting these relationships wrong will take a significant toll on the country’s competitiveness, warns a new report released Tuesday by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
“No part of the economy is more affected by the evolving landscape of Aboriginal rights than the resource industries, if only for the simple fact that many of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples live in close proximity to resource projects,” said the report, Aboriginal Edge: How Aboriginal Peoples and Natural Resource Businesses Are Forging a New Competitive Advantage.
“Constitutionally- protected Aboriginal rights give Canada’s three Aboriginal peoples — First Nations, Metis and Inuit — a unique ability to influence how and where resource projects proceed. Aboriginal peoples are unwilling to trust governments to protect their interests and are deeply concerned about the impacts resource developments will have on their cultural and economic interests. There is a long history of cases where resource developments took place without proper consultation, damaging traditional lands and curtailing Aboriginal rights while providing few offsetting benefits.”
The report said that this has created a legacy of mistrust between the resource industry and aboriginal communities.
“Headlines have tended to focus on cases where the relationship between government, industry and Aboriginal peoples end in conflict, to be addressed either through protest or in the courts. Failure to establish constructive relationships with Aboriginal peoples has caused project delays
No part of the economy is more affected by the evolving landscape of aboriginal rights than the resource industries.
or even cancellations and is creating uncertainty that is discouraging investment. It is clear that this area is a significant challenge for business,” it said.
The report said resource businesses understand that establishing productive relationships with local aboriginal peoples offers them the potential advantages of a local pool of skilled labour, reliable suppliers and access to traditional knowledge about the environment in which they operate.
It said industry and the aboriginal community interest can align in the areas of ownership and investment, employment, participation in the resource sector supply chain, support for community programs and collaboration on environmental protection.
The report said that there are more than 1.4 million people in Canada who identify as First Nations, Inuit or Metis.
“The participation of aboriginal people is vital to our operations. The key for us is to effectively engage communities so they are able to take advantage of career and business development opportunities," said Mark Kruger, spokesperson for Syncrude in an emailed statement.
"In particular, access to education and skills development in remote communities is critical and that is why we place such a large emphasis on investing in those areas. We also have a business liaison who works with aboriginal suppliers to identify potential opportunities to supply goods or services to our company. To date, we’ve spent over $ 2 billion with Aboriginal suppliers from throughout our region.”
Warren Everson, senior vicepresident with the Canadian Chamber, said the report builds on work previously done by the organization on the natural resources sector looking at factors affecting its future prosperity.
One of its projects was on sustainability strategies and how well the country was doing in this area environmentally. That looked at how well industries were doing with respect to the populations around them.
“We found that a growing number of aboriginal businesses are playing a successful role in natural resources. That was a baseline observation,” said Everson.
“That sector, natural resources, is where most aboriginal businesses are focused. So we consider this to be a positive evolution. I guess the next most important thing however is we found there are some challenges in respect to people in aboriginal communities running their own businesses and some things we need to address now to help them make the best run of it.”
The two challenges, he said, include a lack of skills and an education deficiency which causes some of those businesses difficulty to find enough skilled workers. Also, like other small businesses in Canada there are challenges in raising financing.
Brian McGuigan, manager of aboriginal policy with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said that segment of the population is important to the organization. In fact, his position was created about a year ago because of the importance of the issue.
He said member companies are working with communities on a daily basis and many of the companies have long- term agreements with aboriginal communities.
“They work hard at maintaining pretty positive relationships and overall I think they’re very positive relationships there,” said McGuigan.
“There’s a real interest in our industry of tapping into . . . those unemployed workers in aboriginal communities and it could be challenging to do that but companies have done a lot of work around trying to do that.
“And it’s certainly one of the things that we look at as a real possible mutual benefit coming out of the relationship.”
Justin Smith, director of policy, research and government relations with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, said the relationship with the aboriginal sector is critical for the resource sector.
“If you were to look at not just the upstream oil and gas but throughout the value chain of energy, forestry, quarrying, mining, they’re all occurring in areas that are predominantly First Nations or aboriginal land,” said Smith.
“And effective consultation and co- operation with those communities throughout the life cycle of a project is critical for a company to realize success.”