[IPSM] Support the Lubicon Lake Nation (fwd)

[Mike D]

   This is a campaign launched by the Ottawa-based group Outaouais
Lubicon Solidarity. To participate, you will have to sign up to receive
further e-mails. Please go to www.lubiconsolidarity.ca to sign up.

   Please pass this along as far and wide as possible.

WELLS, PIPELINES AND BROKEN PROMISES

A New Campaign To Support The Lubicon Lake Indian Nation
Just A Few Minutes A Day Can Make A Difference


   Outaouais Lubicon Solidarity (OLS) is inviting you to participate in a
simple yet innovative and effective protest campaign to push the
Canadian government to negotiate a just settlement of Lubicon Nation
land rights and finally end this long-standing human rights tragedy.

   While the Lubicon Nation tries to negotiate with the federal and
Alberta governments, more and more oil and gas wells and pipelines are
approved within Lubicon Traditional Territory. In 2002  there were
already over 1,700 oil and gas well sites in Lubicon territory, and
countless miles of pipelines.

   It will only take you a few minutes a day at most to participate, but
the combined effort of Lubicon supporters around the globe can make a
difference.

   WHAT YOU CAN DO

   All you have to do is visit our web site at
www.lubiconsolidarity.ca/brokenpromises and sign up to participate in
the campaign. It'll run for five weeks - from February 6 until March
13, 2005.

   Every time a new oil or gas well or pipeline is approved for
development in Lubicon Traditional Territory, you will receive an
e-mail message from OLS informing you that yet another   development
has been authorized to steal Lubicon resources. They add up -- last
January twenty-two new developments were approved, last February thirty
new developments were approved, and in March eighteen new developments
were approved.

   The e-mail will include a draft letter you can cut and paste into a
new message or letter to send to the Minister of Indian Affairs, with
copies to your Member of Parliament and the Alberta Minister of Native
Affairs. Addresses of the two Ministers will be provided. You can find
out the address of your Member of Parliament by going to the OLS web
site at http://www.lubiconsolidarity.ca/brokenpromises/letters.html.
The draft letter will note that yet another development has been
authorized on Lubicon Territory prior to Lubicon land rights being
resolved and will ask that the Minister meet his Constitutional
responsibility to negotiate the settlement of aboriginal land rights
with the Lubicon people.

   If enough people participate, the responsible officials will be
receiving thousands of e-mails or letters during the campaign, which
will encourage them to take action on this issue at last. The volume
and frequency of e-mails coming in could be significant.

   Please consider participating in this important new initiative. With
your help we hope to demonstrate that a significant number of Canadians
and other supporters around the world are paying close attention to how
the Martin government handles this critical issue.

   You can also help increase the impact by passing this message along to
all of your friends and associates and encouraging them to participate
in the campaign.


Backgrounder


Who are the Lubicon?

The Lubicon Lake Indian Nation, an Indigenous nation of approximately
500 people living in northern Alberta, have never surrendered their
rights to their traditional lands. The Lubicon were simply overlooked
when a treaty was negotiated with other Indigenous peoples in the
region in 1899. A reserve promised to them forty years later was never
established. Since the mid-1980s, negotiations with the federal and
provincial governments have repeatedly broken down. Meanwhile, the
Lubicon say that their health, their way of life and their culture
itself are being steadily destroyed by resource extraction to which
they’ve never consented.

   As Amnesty International said in a recent report, “It’s now been more
than 100 years since the Lubicon were overlooked in the Alberta treaty
process, more than 60 years they were first promised recognition of a
secure landbase, more than a quarter century since the first
negotiations began with the federal government, and more than a decade
since the United Nations called on Canada to stop the violation of the
Lubicons’ human rights. To say that justice is overdue is an
understatement.”

Oil and gas exploitation goes on

While the Lubicon Nation tries to negotiate a settlement of Lubicon
land rights with the federal and Alberta governments, the Alberta
government’s Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) authorizes more and more
oil and gas wells and pipelines within Lubicon Traditional Territory.
In 2002 there were already over 1,700 oil or gas well sites in Lubicon
Traditional Territory and countless miles of pipelines connecting those
to market! Last year alone another 77 oil and gas wells and 75
pipelines were approved within Lubicon Traditional Territory.

   Already nine wells and seven pipelines have been approved since the
beginning of this year. Some of these involve oil sands development
within three miles of the proposed Lubicon reserve lands.

   Further, another over 2,300 hectares of oil and gas leases have been
auctioned off in Lubicon Traditional Territory since the beginning of
this year, netting another $800,000 in lease fees and bonuses for the
province. Over the next month and a half another 30 square kilometres
of Lubicon Territory will be auctioned off into the hands of oil and
gas companies by the province.

   All of these wells, pipelines and leases are designed to steal
non-renewable Lubicon resources prior to any Treaty determining who has
rights to the very lands and resources being forever altered by these
developments.

   The Lubicon Nation estimates that over $13 billion in oil and gas
resources have been taken from Lubicon Traditional Territory since oil
and gas exploitation was begun in earnest 26 years ago. From that, the
Alberta government receives  by conservative estimates  somewhere
around 20% in royalties.

The Lubicon people, for their part, have received no royalties, no
taxes, and no financial compensation for what oil and gas development
has done to their traditional economy and way of life. At most the
Lubicon people have received some seasonal employment building leases
and rights of way for developments they neither control nor approve.


More about this campaign

The campaign will start on February 6, 2005. February 6 will be the
19th anniversary of the delivery of the Fulton report. E. Davie Fulton
was the former federal Justice Minister who was appointed by the
federal government to investigate the Lubicon situation and make
recommendations for settlement. His report, which made reasonable
recommendations to resolve the dispute, was shelved and ignored. Fulton
was dismissed. Now almost 20 years have passed since he made
recommendations for settlement and a settlement is still outstanding.

   The campaign will continue until March 12, which is the 12th
anniversary of the release of the Lubicon Settlement Commission of
Review’s report. The Lubicon Settlement Commission was an independent
and non-partisan tribunal made up of professors, business people,
religious leaders, lawyers, labour leaders and environmentalists who,
like Fulton, investigated all sides of the Lubicon dispute and made a
series of recommendations for settlement  including a recommendation
that all royalties from oil and gas development be held in trust until
settlement and “further, that there be no additional permits or leases
granted on traditional Lubicon lands without Lubicon approval.”

   It was in response to the Lubicon Settlement Commission’s report,
which was presented by the Toronto Friends of the Lubicon to a large
number of MPs in Ottawa as part of a lobby campaign, that then-Liberal
Leader Jean Chretien made the infamous promise to settle Lubicon land
rights once he was Prime Minister  a promise he never upheld.

   One of the other key recommendations of both Fulton and the Settlement
Commission was that financial compensation be paid to the Lubicon
people. The Settlement Commission recommended compensation in the range
of $50 million (in 1992 dollars) from each level of government  now
worth even more in current dollars. This is a key outstanding issue in
land rights negotiations. In light of the enormous amount of resources
being taken from Lubicon Traditional Territory over the past 25 years,
federal negotiators must be given a mandate to negotiate financial
compensation as part of a Lubicon settlement.

   For more information, please visit www.lubiconsolidarity.ca.