Who Stands to Win in Poilievre’s Canada: (Some) First Nations
Last summer, Pierre Poilievre delivered a speech to the Assembly of First Nations blasting what he called the Liberals’ “performative reconciliation.” In other words, talking a big game but accomplishing little. His government, he said, would make tangible differences in Indigenous people’s lives—mostly by getting them access to cold, hard cash from resource-extraction projects. “If reconciliation means anything,” he declared, “it means saying yes to economic opportunities.”
His preferred vehicle for doing so is the First Nations Resource Charge, a proposed policy intended to streamline negotiations between Indigenous communities, governments and resource companies. The FNRC proposes allowing Indigenous communities to negotiate directly with firms that want to exploit resources on their land, rather than involve other levels of government. The companies, in turn, would pay 50 per cent of their federal tax to the relevant Indigenous communities. And resource projects would happen faster, at least theoretically.
The FNRC was first proposed by the First Nations Tax Commission, an Indigenous-led organization that regulates property taxation on reserve lands. But in January of 2023, Poilievre embraced the policy as the cornerstone of his pitch to Indigenous voters. It ticks plenty of boxes in Poilievre’s playbook: natural-resource expansion, a disdain for Ottawa “gatekeepers” and a bootstraps approach to economic self-
reliance. The plan has been lauded by many First Nations leaders. Grand Chief Mike Lebourdais, of Whispering Pines First Nation in B.C., says, “The First Nations Resource Charge means less time negotiating and more time raising our quality of life to national standards.” Chief Sharlene Gale, of Fort Nelson First Nation in B.C., says that it will mean nations like hers finally have fiscal jurisdiction on their own land.
Others are skeptical. When Poilievre pitched the idea in a speech to the Assembly of First Nations last summer, some in the audience turned their backs. Others questioned why he had so little to say on matters like missing and murdered women, or the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities.
Hayden King is executive director of the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. To him, the FNRC is less about empowering First Nations and more about getting the go-ahead for industry to haul more lumber, minerals and oil out of the ground. “Poilievre has read the room and realized that he’s not just going to drive these projects forward without some degree of participation,” he says. “So he encourages First Nations to say, ‘We’re going to get a cut of this; let’s fast-track the regulatory processes.’ ”
That may be enticing in some circumstances. But it also offers little to First Nations that don’t have resources to exploit, or that have reservations about allowing industry access to them. And Poilievre has been unsparing when condemning the latter. In 2020, when Indigenous activists staged rail blockades to oppose a natural gas pipeline through unceded territory in B.C., he said it was an affront to Canadians’ rights—and that the government had tools to put the protests down.
Advocates hope that the FNRC will enrich communities and deliver economic sovereignty. But to its detractors, it perpetuates a narrow vision of reconciliation—one that may divide First Nations based on whether or not they play ball.
