[IPSM] SFGate: FUELING AMERICA/CANADIAN OIL SHOWDOWN/Frozen pipeline: Tribe's success at blocking natural gas delivery system threatens development of oil-sands mines (fwd)

[IPSM]

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Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 16:07:42 -0800
From: Janine Bandcroft <eternity at islandnet.com>
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Subject: SFGate: FUELING AMERICA/CANADIAN OIL SHOWDOWN/Frozen pipeline: Tribe's
     success at blocking natural gas delivery system threatens development of
     oil-sands mines

From: "telquaa,Helen Michell" <telquaa at hotmail.com>


  important article to pass on
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This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/23/MNGNVCT8F41.DTL
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Monday, May 23, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
FUELING AMERICA/CANADIAN OIL SHOWDOWN/Frozen pipeline: Tribe's success at 
blocking natural gas delivery system threatens development of oil-sands mines
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer


    Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories -- This town on a bend in the
Mackenzie River has a general store and little else besides endless
forests and distant blue mountains. Not an oil derrick is to be seen. But
its angry Native tribe is standing in the way of what could be the biggest
energy boom in North America's history.
    The tribe, the Deh Cho First Nation, is blocking an 800-mile pipeline that
would pass through its lands carrying natural gas from the Arctic Ocean to
the booming oil-sands mines of Alberta. The tribe says the money and
development brought by the pipeline could destroy its culture while
leaving little lasting economic benefit.
    "We have lived in these lands since time immemorial," said the Deh Cho
grand chief, Herb Norwegian. "We are the rightful owners, and this
pipeline should not be pushed in against our will."
    The Deh Cho anti-pipeline stance is spreading through Native tribes in
northwest Canada, putting at risk the development of Arctic natural gas in
both Canada and Alaska as well as expansion of Canada's oil sands, which
are widely considered the most promising source of foreign oil for the
United States in the coming decades.
    The oil sands need natural gas to help steam-heat oil out of the sands.
With natural gas reserves and production shrinking elsewhere in Alberta
and North America, a new supply from the Mackenzie River is needed to fill
the gap and keep the oil sands pumping ever-increasing amounts of
petroleum south to the United States.
    But as the Deh Cho have deftly used the Canadian courts and regulatory
process to block the pipeline, their demands have had a domino effect
among other tribes that own a one-third share in the project. Grassroots
pressure has forced the leaders of those tribes -- the Inuvialuit,
Gwich'in and Sahtu Dene -- to demand broad taxation powers and $40 million
in additional payments from their partners in the pipeline.
    On April 29, the oil companies stopped all engineering work on the
pipeline and threatened to call off the entire project. Michael Yeager,
senior vice president of the Imperial Oil Co., a partner in the pipeline
consortium, accused the Deh Cho and the other tribes of making excessive
compensation demands for a pipeline right- of-way and payments for social
benefits.
    "We're talking about something here that is many, many fold from what we
were expecting, and into the hundreds of millions of dollars," Yeager
said.
    He said Shell and its partners in the consortium -- ExxonMobil, Conoco
Phillips and Imperial Oil, a Canadian company in which ExxonMobil has a
majority stake -- had already spent $300 million on preparatory work, yet
were way behind schedule and could no longer cope with "more and more
months of slippage."
    The Deh Cho have held up environmental and planning approvals for the
pipeline route, about 40 percent of which crosses Deh Cho lands, by filing
regulatory appeals and public information requests. Yeager said his
consortium has filed more than 6,500 pages of documents in response to
queries from the Deh Cho, the other tribes and the government, with
thousands more pages expected to be necessary.
    The center of the resistance is Fort Simpson, a longtime trading post that
functions as the capital of the Deh Cho region. About 2,500 people live in
the town, about two-thirds of them Natives. The pipeline route passes
about 10 miles to the east.
    Fort Simpson boasts several streets lined with boxy prefabricated houses.
The general store sells everything from snowshoes to groceries; a tiny
Pizza Hut inside is the town's only concession to 21st century
commercialism. There are two small motels, two bars, a video store,
several government offices, a Roman Catholic church and a community
center. The highway to the outside world crosses the nearby Liard River --
a frozen ice traverse much of the year and a ferry ride during the summer.
    Many residents say they feel a special destiny to uphold the rights of
Canada's indigenous minority, which has long been hobbled by poverty and
social ills. Visitors are eagerly shown the stage in Fort Simpson's
riverfront park where Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in 1987.
    Norwegian, 53, was born in Fort Simpson but spent much of his youth "out
on the land" with his father, hunting and trapping. He then became a
heavy- equipment mechanic, working on construction and highway projects
for many years, until he entered local politics in the early 1990s.
    Since being elected grand chief in 2001, he has blocked progress on the
pipeline while insisting that he is not against the project itself.
    "Some people say that if this pipeline never gets built, Herb Norwegian is
to blame for it," he said. "And I'm fine with that. But if it does get
built, I want my people to get real benefits."
    He acknowledges that his stand on the pipeline is tightly linked to his
tribe's negotiations with the federal government over its historic land
claims. The Deh Cho are the only tribe on the pipeline route that has not
reached a settlement, and "a land settlement would sure help improve the
atmosphere for the pipeline," he said.
    The Deh Cho are seeking to establish a new autonomous government under
which all residents could vote, but a five-year residency requirement
would exclude newly arrived non-Natives.
    In addition to demanding the right to levy taxes, regulate all development
and operate their own police and courts, the Deh Cho want complete
ownership of subsurface mineral rights -- within their entire
81,000-square- mile claim, about the size of Nebraska.
    Christopher Reid, the chief Deh Cho negotiator, said the tribe is asking
for a level of autonomy "fundamentally different" from anything Canada has
granted its Native population -- or even its white-dominated provinces.
    "The Deh Cho have a clear vision of self-government, and they are not
willing to settle for anything less than this," he said.
    At first glance, this Native cause can seem a throwback to a long-lost
era. Economic development of Native lands has won out almost everywhere
else.
    In Alaska, Native land claims were dissolved in the early 1970s, replaced
by profit-making corporations owned by Native citizens. In the Mackenzie
Valley, the Inuvialuit, Gwich'in and Sahtu Dene leaderships approved the
pipeline three years ago and formed a joint company, the Aboriginal
Pipeline Group, that agreed to borrow $1 billion to buy a one-third share
of the consortium that is developing the gas fields and building the
pipeline.
    "We have to adjust to progress; we have to stop dreaming about tradition
and living off the land," said Doug Cardinal, a Deh Cho member who is a
senior executive of Aboriginal Pipeline. "We can't turn back the clock."
    But Native groups up and down the pipeline route appear to be swinging
behind the Deh Cho. The federal treaties that the Inuvialuit, Gwich'in and
Sahtu Dene tribes signed in the 1980s and 1990s provide that if a
neighboring tribe wins better terms, their own treaties will automatically
match those.
    On Tuesday, an Alberta tribe, the 2,500-member Dene Tha, sued the federal
government and Imperial Oil to stop the pipeline, claiming that the
planning process ignored its concerns.
    "The oil companies are miscalculating," said Stephen Kakfwi, a former
premier of the Northwest Territories who is now chief negotiator for a
Sahtu Dene faction that has joined the Deh Cho coalition.
    "Unless we do something today," he said, "all the oil and gas will be gone
from our land, and everybody will get rich except us."
    Around Fort Simpson, opinions seem heavily weighted in favor of Norwegian.
At a two-day public meeting the Deh Cho held in April to assess local
opinion about the pipeline, dozens of townspeople railed against it and
visiting government and oil company officials. No one spoke in favor.
    "You're pulling the wool over our eyes," Nick Sibbeston, the owner of a
bed-and-breakfast inn and a member of the part-time appointed federal
Senate, told a panel of oil executives, referring to their promises of
jobs, business contracts and environmental protection. "There's been a
credibility gap. We don't really believe you. We don't really trust you.
You can't fudge it and hide it."
    After the public meeting, people seemed more opposed than ever. In dozens
of interviews, both Deh Cho and non-Native residents said they feared the
effects of easy money.
    They noted that oil and mining booms elsewhere in northern Canada have
left legacies of alcoholism, drug abuse and violence in Native communities
and have failed to create long-term local jobs.
    "We are worried about the pipeline, how it will bring in too much money
and destroy our way of life," said Michael Cazon, a Deh Cho member who
teaches youth classes at the tribal social center.
    "Crystal meth just made it to Hay River," said Cazon's wife, Tonya, a
government office worker, referring to a town 180 miles to the east.
"That's not too far. It's just a matter of months before it will come
here. We're trying to protect our kids," said Tonya, who was born in the
province of Ontario and describes her background as "pretty much mostly
white."
    The Cazons, however, also illustrate how the Deh Cho are already dependent
on Canada's generous welfare state. Like the Cazons, most Fort Simpson
residents are government employees, beneficiaries of more than $8 million
in annual subsidies that the federal and Northwest Territories governments
grant to the tribe and Fort Simpson.
    "There is very little private business here, and economic dependency is a
real problem," Norwegian said.
    If the Mackenzie standoff is not resolved, growing Native resistance could
poison chances for a second pipeline, a 2,600-mile, $20 billion project to
carry natural gas from Alaska's North Slope along the Alaska-Canada
highway through Yukon and British Columbia.
    The Alaska pipeline, which is strongly supported by North Slope oil
producers and Alaskan politicians, is expected to start construction in
about 2009 and be completed by about 2015.
    "The oil companies should see the Mackenzie situation as a wake-up call,
but they haven't," said Dave Porter, chief of the Kaska Dene First Nation
and negotiator for a coalition of 10 tribal groups in British Columbia and
Yukon whose lands surround the proposed Alaska pipeline right of way.
    Three of these 10 tribes have unresolved historic land claims against the
federal government, and all are demanding that any pipeline deal grant
them the same sort of tax powers and social spending programs as the
Mackenzie groups want.
    Porter said that government has ignored tribal requests.
    "This is absolutely the wrong approach, the wrong strategy," Porter added.
"They are going to be susceptible, open to legal challenge, like what has
happened in the Mackenzie Valley."
    E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier at sfchronicle.com. 
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Copyright 2005 SF Chronicle


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