The First Nation Major Projects Coalition (FNMPC) has recently released a guide for Indigenous Nations, funded by the federal government, to understand and effectively get involved in project impact assessments processes.
“It is important because it is a tool that helps them work towards reconciliation, ensuring that they have free, prior and informed consent of a process in which they are part of the decision making process. It impacts their aboriginal rights and so we created a tool to try to work towards a better way of making decisions with an adequate level of an Indigenous worldview,” said Angel Ransom, the Director of Operations and Impact Assessment Lead for the FNMPC.
The guide is essentially a ‘how to’ describing the process involved in working with the government and businesses on developing projects surrounding Indigenous communities.
“We realized when Bill C-69 came out that all the existing regulatory processes were complicated. So the guide helps First Nations navigate their way through the new Impact Assessment Act; it helps them provide an understanding of why the changes were being proposed by the government in the first place, and there are key areas that have changed in regards to particular Indigenous involvement. So we highlight that previously there was no early engagement phase and now the government encourages companies to speak with First Nations as soon as a project becomes an idea and we are doing this because the old process wasn’t working,” said Ransom, adding that this is the first part of the guide while the second part talks about key changes relevant specifically to Indigenous people and not the broader public.
The third part of the guide however, is the most important tool according to her as it “helps Indigenous Nations realize their opportunities for their involvement in this new process and how they can successfully prepare for it, and contribute to it.” The final part of the the document contains additional supporting tools that feed into this larger assessment process.
The coalition however realized that a 144 page document might not be useful for everyone with respect to time, capacity or availability and so they also created an eight-part video series.
“The videos are about two to four minutes each and speak directly to the guide in a video format, a shorter, condensed version for say, a community that has never gone through such an assessment, some of the basics which they need to know should an impact assessment be proposed within their territory,” she said.
Cheslatta Carrier Nation Chief Corinna Leween, who is also the vice-chair for the FNMPC, voiced her happiness and satisfaction over the guide and thought that the process of putting together the guide was also great as it brought together people from the grassroots level.
“A lot of times that’s missed and there is a lot of knowledge within our elders, within our community members, and those that grew up on the land, in respect of communities and that is not taken into account; the focus is more on engineering and profits but there are certain ways in which if you do things, you can still get those but also protect the environment,” said Leween.
The coalition, created five years ago with 13 Northern B.C. Nations, now has over 67 First Nations communities and organizations from all over Canada.
“While we do have 67 members across Canada, we realize that the capacity need within one Indigenous community is quite often unfortunately no different than another community so we designed tools that could be used by all Indigenous nations and communities across Canada. They are publicly available now on our website,” said Ransom.
The next step in the process is to “create a training program where FNMPC provides training to community technicians to understand how this guide is important to them when entering into impact assessment and how they might want to consider doing better impact assessments of what matters most to their communities,” said Ransom adding that they would soon be taking things to the next level of implementation and training.
“The guide is only as good as people using it. They have to be willing to trust that it is a document that has taken quite a bit of time and quite a bit of developing through people and that’s why it works because of the people driving it,” said Leween.
Priyanka Ketkar
Multimedia journalist
@PriyankaKetkar
priyanka.ketkar@ldnews.net
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