www.lexpert.ca 11
governments have been unable to react with
policy and approaches quickly enough, he
says. e government's attitude tends to be
"as long as we don't do anything on your land,
we're OK. We owe you no obligation." But
what Ermineskin and AltaLink signify is that
the obligation can be to allow development,
says Roth.
"ere's this balancing of traditional rights
and exercises of treaty rights. But if industry
and First Nations can come up with a good
way of coming to that balance, then govern-
ments have an obligation to actually approve
these projects.
"Industry is seeing that the stakes are: come
in with the Aboriginal support, equity interest,
advancing economic reconciliation, and you
have a way to deal with government resistance
to project development," says Roth.
Freedman says that, because of its overuse,
the word "reconciliation" has "in a lot of ways,
become meaningless."
"I have clients who really dislike the use of
the word, and the reason that they dislike it,
from what I've heard, is it's oen hijacked by
government officials and others to basically
do a few little things, then somehow say that
they've achieved reconciliation."
When it comes to equity deals, he says,
"if you have real negotiations – not ones
where the Indigenous organization feels
they have no choice but to cut a deal – but
where there's real discussion … benefiting in
economic development, in a real way, is, in
my view, one aspect of reconciliation. For
sure, I would say one. ere's lots of others."
"I've been doing this work for over 28
years. And from where I started, in terms
of Indigenous organizations having more of
an economic role in projects, it's certainly
better than where I started," Freedman says.
But he adds, "ere are a lot of compa-
nies who still don't think they should be
doing anything at all. Or that somehow,
they're sort of being hijacked to do some-
thing. Until you get more and more
companies understanding that it's not just
a good thing to do, it's legally necessary, it's
going to be slow. But it's certainly getting
better. But it's very slow."
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