Native tax issue remains
“I’m optimistic it can happen by November,” he said. “We’d like to have everybody involved, but it does reach a point where you may not be able to get a 100% consensus, and so you have to go with the majority. And that’s … life.”
The Deh Cho, the largest of the five communities taking part in the high-stakes talks and whose lands would make up 43% of the pipeline’s 1,220-kilometre length, said yesterday it is reconsidering its hard-line stance that money from access and benefits agreements be collected through a land tax applied to the pipeline.
On Monday Deh Cho chief Keyna Norwegian had said the Deh Cho, the Gwi’chn, two Sahtu communities and the Inuvialiut agreed they had the right to tax the pipeline and would negotiate access and benefits pacts with that in mind, hoping to generate a yearly stream of revenue.
But the federal government and Northwest Territories both said the issue is a non-starter because none of the communities has the right to collect taxes until they first negotiate a pact with Ottawa to gain self-government.
Ms. Norwegian’s position was based on a belief aboriginal communities had the right to levy a tax according to their traditional treaties. She added the new position leaves the Sahtu community around Fort Good Hope isolated in its quest for authority to tax through the access and benefits negotiations with Imperial.
The Sahtu group’s negotiator is the former premier of the Northwest Territories, Stephen Kakfwi, who has been pushing hard for an annual revenue stream to flow from the pipeline.
The other groups, Ms. Norwegian said, are also willing to scrap the tax idea.
Imperial Oil and project partners ExxonMobil Corp., ConocoPhillips, Shell Canada Ltd. and the Aboriginal Pipeline Group have offered a one-time payment to gain access to land, which is the model used elsewhere in Canada. Talks hit a wall in the spring because of the taxation issue and it was one reason engineering work on the project was brought to a halt.
Imperial says it will state by early November whether the project will proceed to public hearings. Spokesman Pius Rolheiser said access and benefits agreements don’t need to be secured for that to happen. He also suggested unanimous support from all of the aboriginal groups is unnecessary.
“Support from all of the groups would be ideal,” he said. “Beyond that, I can’t get into speculating about how many would be enough. These are sensitive negotiations.”