Category: Tar Sands

News reports are ablaze with reports of loom­ing Indige­nous block­ades and eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion. As the Idle No More move­ment explodes into a new ter­ri­to­ry of polit­i­cal action, it bears to ampli­fy the incred­i­ble eco­nom­ic lever­age of First Nations today, and how fright­ened the gov­ern­ment and indus­try are of their capac­i­ty to wield it.

In recent years, Access to Infor­ma­tion (ATI) records obtained by jour­nal­ists reveal a mas­sive state-wide sur­veil­lance and “hot spot mon­i­tor­ing” oper­a­tion coor­di­nat­ed between the Depart­ment of Indi­an Affairs, the Roy­al Cana­di­an Mount­ed Police (RCMP), the Cana­di­an Secu­ri­ty Intel­li­gence Ser­vice (CSIS), local secu­ri­ty forces, nat­ur­al resource and trans­porta­tion min­istries, bor­der agen­cies, and indus­try stake­hold­ers. These efforts have been explic­it­ly mobi­lized to pro­tect “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture” from Indige­nous attack.

What is crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture? Accord­ing to an RCMP inter­nal doc­u­ment con­cern­ing the risk of Abo­rig­i­nal protest, “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture refers to infra­struc­ture, both tan­gi­ble and intan­gi­ble, that is essen­tial to the health, safe­ty, secu­ri­ty or eco­nom­ic well-being of Cana­di­ans and the effec­tive func­tion­ing of gov­ern­ment.” RCMP Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tions have pri­or­i­tized four crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture sec­tors: finance, trans­porta­tion, ener­gy, and cyber-secu­ri­ty.

On Jan­u­ary 5 alone, INM protests includ­ed five bor­der cross­ing block­ades, bridge block­ades, and rail line dis­rup­tions span­ning the coun­try.

And it’s not only intel­li­gence ser­vices that are warn­ing of threats to crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture.

Con­ser­v­a­tive mil­i­tary ana­lyst Dou­glas Bland has also long warned that Canada’s eco­nom­ic vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is based on the “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture that trans­ports nat­ur­al resources and man­u­fac­tured goods from mines, oil fields, hydro-elec­tric facil­i­ties and fac­to­ries to inter­na­tion­al mar­kets.” With­out these crit­i­cal sys­tems, he cau­tions, “Canada’s econ­o­my would col­lapse.”

Though Bland has coun­seled a con­cil­ia­to­ry approach to Abo­rig­i­nals in order to stave off the com­ing cri­sis, his alarmism – and that of oth­er right-wing pun­dits – simul­ta­ne­ous­ly jus­ti­fies the state’s secu­ri­ty and sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus by man­u­fac­tur­ing a fear of native upris­ing. But for Bland and oth­ers, a com­ing “Native Spring” is less feared for its poten­tial “vio­lence” and all the more grave for its threat to prop­er­ty rights.

In Bland’s fic­tion­al book Upris­ing, he pre­dicts coor­di­nat­ed attacks by secret native cells on key instal­la­tions and urban hubs, such as the James Bay hydro-elec­tric dam and the down­town core of Win­nipeg. This attack on crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture telling­ly ends in a blaze of hero­ic Cana­da-US mil­i­tary attacks on the rebel army. (The US gets involved only when they real­ize their source of elec­tric­i­ty, oil, and gas is at stake.)

Here­in lies the real role of right wing alarmists in the INM move­ment: to main­tain the eco­nom­ic sta­tus quo, because ter­ri­to­ry is cap­i­tal. Land is mon­ey. And the cir­cu­la­tion of goods, resources and ener­gy through ter­ri­to­ry is the very essence of cap­i­tal­ism today.

The fact is that crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture in Cana­da is at the mer­cy of Indige­nous peo­ples, who are more rur­al than Cana­di­ans and have access to impor­tant arter­ies for eco­nom­ic flows: trans­porta­tion cor­ri­dors, ener­gy sec­tors, and sites of nat­ur­al resource extrac­tion.

This vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is dead­ly to the logis­tics indus­try. Logis­tics is a busi­ness sci­ence con­cerned with the man­age­ment of goods and infor­ma­tion through glob­al sup­ply chains. As the World Bank has declared: “A com­pet­i­tive net­work of glob­al logis­tics is the back­bone of inter­na­tion­al trade.” For an indus­try depen­dent on main­tain­ing open chan­nels for cap­i­tal cir­cu­la­tion, a block­ade means mas­sive loss­es: the truck­ing indus­try alone is worth $65 bil­lion and employs more than 260,000 dri­vers.

In the ener­gy sec­tor, Cana­da has oil reserves sec­ond in the world after Sau­di Ara­bia, though less acces­si­ble – 98 per cent of this oil is in Alber­ta and 95 per cent of it is in the tar sands, where effec­tive Indige­nous resis­tance by Treaty 8 and oth­er First Nations has led to glob­al boy­cott cam­paigns and fierce resis­tance.

In north­ern BC, the Unist’ot’en Clan, with sup­port from grass­roots Wet’suwet’en, have built a com­mu­ni­ty of resis­tance direct­ly on the GPS co-ordi­nates of the pro­posed pipeline route from the Alber­ta tar sands to the Kiti­mat port. From this camp they have evict­ed sur­vey­ors work­ing for Pacif­ic Trails Pipeline. Mean­while, in Ontario, Enbrdige’s Line 9 has been has been opposed by the Onei­da, the Hau­denosaunee Devel­op­ment Insti­tute, and Aami­ji­waang First Nation, who have all vowed to fight the pipeline to pro­tect their lands and waters.

In terms of nat­ur­al resource extrac­tion, over 10 per cent of Canada’s econ­o­my is com­prised of the nat­ur­al resources sec­tors and earth sci­ence indus­tries, which direct­ly employ close to 763,000 peo­ple. The great­est con­cen­tra­tion and cor­re­la­tion between Indige­nous lands and min­er­al claims are being cur­rent­ly devel­oped in the north­ern mod­ern treaties and ter­ri­to­ries, such as Nunavut; Yukon; the James Bay region of Que­bec, and the Que­bec-Labrador bor­der; on unced­ed north­west­ern BC lands (e.g. on Nakazdli, Tzal­ten, and Tlin­git tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry); and in north­ern Ontario’s “Ring of Fire” on his­toric treaty lands, par­tic­u­lar­ly Treaties 3 and 9.

In addi­tion to min­er­al resources, over half of large intact for­est land­scapes are found on lands in his­tor­i­cal Abo­rig­i­nal treaty areas. More specif­i­cal­ly, as Glob­al For­est Watch reports, “Treaties 8 and 9 con­tain about a quar­ter of all of Canada’s intact for­est land­scapes and close to half of all the intact for­est land­scapes that occur with­in treaty areas. Mod­ern land claim set­tle­ments con­tain about a quar­ter of Canada’s intact for­est land­scapes.”

That is not to say mean­ing­ful con­sul­ta­tion con­cern­ing crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture has not been tak­ing place. The prob­lem is that it has exclu­sive­ly been between indus­try and gov­ern­ment, instead of between Indige­nous peo­ples and the state. Jour­nal­ists have been uncov­er­ing mul­ti­ple inci­dents of high-lev­el co-ordi­na­tion between indus­try and gov­ern­ment offi­cials. For exam­ple, Access to Infor­ma­tion requests revealed that the gov­ern­ment has been shar­ing infor­ma­tion with the oil indus­try on envi­ron­men­tal­ists and Indige­nous groups twice a year since 2005 at secret brief­in­gs, even on such seem­ing­ly irrel­e­vant activ­i­ties such as par­tic­i­pa­tion in anti-G20 demon­stra­tions.

The irony is that many cor­po­ra­tions are tired of hav­ing oper­a­tions held up by Indige­nous protest and are will­ing to go fur­ther than gov­ern­ments to rec­og­nize Indige­nous rights. The log­ics of colo­nial­ism and cap­i­tal­ism divide here around con­flict­ing objec­tives of ter­ri­to­r­i­al acqui­si­tion ver­sus the cir­cu­la­tion of goods. But more often than not, the state and indus­try con­verge around the com­mon inter­ests of the rul­ing class. For Indige­nous peo­ples, this becomes a ques­tion of co-ordi­nat­ing lever­age.

In con­clu­sion, I want to high­light three main con­cerns expressed in the risk assess­ments under­tak­en by RCMP, CSIS, Indi­an Affairs, and right-wing thinkers on Indige­nous upris­ing that fore­ground Indige­nous eco­nom­ic pow­er.

The first is that a mis­han­dling of con­flict will gal­va­nize co-ordi­nat­ed efforts of First Nations across the coun­try; hence the rel­a­tive­ly hands-off approach tak­en until now. In the Fed­er­al Coor­di­na­tion Frame­work for the AFN Day of Action in 2007, the pro­posed solu­tion in the case of co-ordi­nat­ed mobi­liza­tion is to “iso­late the splin­ter group.”

Sec­ond, the eco­nom­ic cost of even a few hours of such co-ordi­nat­ed efforts would be crip­pling and impos­si­ble to police giv­en cur­rent resources.

Third – and this is one of the most wor­ri­some trends to observers – sol­i­dar­i­ty and co-ordi­na­tion between non-Natives and Indige­nous peo­ples will encour­age the move­ment to build.

As a final thought, while the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion might have been tak­en by sur­prise by the strength of Idle No More, the gov­ern­ment had long pre­pared for this inevitabil­i­ty. As far back as 2008, when changes were first pro­posed to the Nav­i­ga­ble Waters Act, CSIS’s Inte­grat­ed Threat Assess­ment Cen­tre warned about “poten­tial unrest.”

Cana­da cre­at­ed the cri­sis of insur­gency. Canada’s greed cre­at­ed a sit­u­a­tion where Indige­nous peo­ples stand with almost noth­ing to lose. There­fore, the fight is theirs to take. It is also ours to sup­port.

Read the full arti­cle here.