(July 3, 2014) Natives do not view Canada’s north as a vast theme park.

Chief Roger William, right, of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation, is flanked by chiefs and other officials as he pauses while speaking during a news conference in Vancouver, B.C., after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation, granting it land title to 438,000-hectares of land on Thursday June 26, 2014. The Canadian Press / Darryl Dyck.

This article, by Lawrence Solomon, first appeared in the National Post

First Nations are big winners in the Supreme Court decision last week, which decided that natives, and not provinces, will obtain secure title to vast areas of now disputed land. But resource companies are winners, too, in that they’ll soon be able to powwow with clear owners of the land, rather than endlessly hold “meaningful consultations” with the myriad stakeholders demanding says in developments.

The only clear losers are the natives’ environmental allies, who helped them thwart proposed resource developments that would have compromised native control over their land. Now that the environmentalists have served their purpose, the native groups can tell them to take a hike.

Northern Quebec’s James Bay hydroelectric project — the environmental pariah of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — provides the script. In 2002, after decades of fighting the Quebec government’s mega development plans, the Grand Council of the Crees signed “The Peace of the Braves,” an agreement with the Quebec government that gave the Cree $3.5-billion over 50 years as their share of revenue from mining, logging and hydroelectric development. The Cree got something else, too — joint management of the resource industries, and the respect that accompanied it.

Environmentalists called this deal a sellout. Cree Chief Mathew Coon Come, whose anti-James Bay leadership catapulted him to become the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, called it a boon that would protect his people’s right to self-determination while providing revenue from their land. Today the Cree culture is strong, life expectancy is long, and their population is booming. The Cree not only remain a hunting people but also now run construction and forest operations, have their own airline, control their own destiny and have no need of their former allies at Greenpeace and Sierra Club, who once-upon-a-time were so useful in helping them secure the means for development.

The Mackenzie Valley script is similar. With help from environmentalists who wanted to preserve (i.e. freeze) the natives’ way of life, the natives of the Mackenzie Valley in the 1970s beat back a proposed pipeline that would have shipped natural gas from the Arctic to Alberta and beyond. By the early 2000s, after various land claims were settled, aboriginal groups extracted for themselves a one-third interest in the $16-billion pipeline, which in 2011 received the regulatory approvals needed to proceed.

By this point, however, the script had taken an unexpected turn. Because the shale gas revolution in the U.S. was flooding the continent with natural gas, prices more than halved, delaying the need for Arctic gas indefinitely and making the pipeline unnecessary. To the dismay of the Mackenzie Valley aboriginals, the delays in settling land claims had lost for them a bonanza. The winners, instead, were native peoples in the United States, many of whose reservations have proven to be lucrative oil and gas shale plays. Thanks to these and other resource developments, and to the American Indians’ ability to negotiate for themselves royalties from developers 50% higher than the rate the federal government manages, America’s Indians now land some $1-billion a year in resource royalties. For good measure, the Indians give the developers short five-year leases, to encourage them to get the goods out of the ground while the getting’s good: 94% of Indian leases are producing energy, and thus royalties, compared to 48% of the typical 10-year-term federal leases.

The lesson for Canada’s natives, and Canada’s governments, is clear: Interminable delays in settling land ownership, and in getting on with developing our natural resources, can be ruinous for the energy developments that both ultimately need and want to promote prosperity. The Supreme Court decision has clarified ownership as no previous court has done, clearing the decks for the parties to resolve the less fundamental remaining issues. As the Mackenzie Valley natives discovered, Canada’s oil and gas are depletable resources in more ways than one — they can be here today, gone tomorrow, if not first exploited wisely.

The lesson for environmentalists should also be clear. Natives do not share their vision of Canada’s north as a vast theme park, set aside as a picturesque habitat for moose, bear, caribou and Indians for the benefit of white men on eco-tours. Natives desire development on their own terms and will use their land as they see fit. Courtesy of the Supreme Court decision, that development will now come sooner than later.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute. Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

This article was quoted by Harderblog (a trade news blog from a Pacific perspective for the softwood lumber industry):