From Resource Works

By Geoff Russ

“We’re not talking about reconciliation anymore…we’re talking about prosperity, and making sure it lasts.”

Ellis Ross stepped onto the stage at the Vancouver Convention Centre last year. He didn’t reach for notes, and spoke plainly to the audience of business leaders, chiefs, and policymakers gathered for the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase (IPSS).

“I’m very proud to say that my band, the Haisla Band, is no longer talking about unemployment, poverty, reconciliation,” Ross said. “We’re talking about the management of wealth.”

Ross’s message was equal parts challenge and triumph, and was followed by a standing ovation for a man who has lived the slow climb from the margins to the mainstream. Once a water-taxi operator in Kitamaat Village, he is now one of the country’s most influential Indigenous political figures.

As he returns as a featured guest to this year’s IPSS, Ross embodies the event’s core theme: Shared Prosperity Now.

Born and raised in the Haisla Nation near Kitimat, Ross spent his early life in a community scarred by unemployment and a lack of opportunity.

“We had nothing,” Ross told the Arc Energy Ideas podcast last year. “We were begging for money, begging for infrastructure. We were one of the poorest bands in British Columbia.” Under his leadership, that changed forever.

As Haisla chief councillor from 2011 to 2017, Ross helped transform his community through industry partnerships rooted in resource development. He rejecting the old idea that development was a natural enemy of culture, and steered the Haisla into the energy economy on their own terms by embracing liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The Cedar LNG project, co-owned by the Haisla Nation and Pembina Pipeline, will become the largest Indigenous-majority-owned energy project in Canada’s history.

“It will have one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world,” said Crystal Smith, Ross’ successor as Haisla Chief Councillor. Cedar LNG is scheduled to begin operation in 2028.

For Ross, participation means power.

“If you uplift an Aboriginal community, the biggest beneficiaries, apart from First Nations, are the rest of British Columbia,” he said at IPSS in 2023. “We’ve got no malls or car dealerships on reserves. We spend it in our neighbouring communities.”

Ross’s journey hasn’t been without conflict. Writing in the Times Colonist in 2020, he warned of foreign-funded activists “hijacking our future” by dividing Indigenous communities and undermining resource partnerships.

“The last thing any of us need is intervention from foreign groups that want to hijack our future for their own objectives,” he wrote, condemning the influence of U.S. foundations funnelling money to anti-development campaigns.

He is vehemently opposed to “distraction politics”, and it became a hallmark of Ross’s political career. As MLA for Skeena from 2017 to 2024, Ross built a reputation for straight talk. He was eager to defend both workers and environmental standards for the modern resource industry.

With a pragmatic style, he gained admiration from both business leaders and former premier Christy Clark, who has praised Ross because he “fought for an LNG industry that will be the cleanest, the greenest, and the safest anywhere in the world.”

By early 2024, Ross announced his move to federal politics, saying he wanted to take “the principles I’ve developed over the last 15 years” to Ottawa.

Now the Member of Parliament for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, he’s now one of the most prominent Indigenous voices in the House of Commons, and one of the few with deep experience in both community governance and heavy industry.

Recently, Ross said he plans to hold the federal government to its promise of making Canada an “energy superpower.”

“For the area and for Canada, I want to hold this government accountable for those words,” he told the Prince George Citizen. “Projects like LNG Canada and Cedar LNG can show the world how Indigenous leadership and environmental responsibility go hand in hand.”

Ross’s attendance at IPSS 2025 comes at a moment when Indigenous participation in major projects is reshaping the national economy.

More than two dozen First Nations now hold equity in energy, mining, or infrastructure developments. It is proof that reconciliation, in his view, must be measured not in lofty statements but in actual ownership.

“You’ve got to leave a lot of those old narratives at the door,” he told delegates. “We’re not victims. We’re builders.”

Now, from the carpet of Parliament Hill to the polished floors of the Vancouver Convention Centre, Ellis Ross continues to speak for both the Haisla and the wider coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians who believe in growth through partnership.

As IPSS Event Lead Margareta Dovgal put it, “He bridges worlds—the boardroom, the band office, and the floor of the legislature.”

When Ross steps back onto the IPSS stage this November, expect the same mix of candour and conviction that has defined his career. “

We’re not talking about reconciliation anymore…we’re talking about prosperity, and making sure it lasts.”

From the Fraser Institute

By Bruce Pardy

A judge of the British Columbia Supreme Court recently found that the Cowichan First Nation holds Aboriginal title over 800 acres of government land in Richmond, British Columbia. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it’s a “prior and senior right” to fee simple title, whether public or private. That means it trumps the property that Canadians hold in their houses, farms and factories.

In Canada, property rights do not have constitutional status. No right to property is included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Fee simple title is merely a gloss on the state’s constitutional authority to tax, regulate and expropriate private property as it sees fit. But Aboriginal rights are different. They have become more constitutionally powerful than any Charter right.

In 1968, then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau released a consultation paper that proposed a constitutional charter of human rights. It was the first iteration of what would become the Charter. In the paper, Trudeau proposed to guarantee a right to property. So did drafts that followed. But some provincial governments were dead set against entrenching property rights. By 1980, property had been dropped from proposals. The final version of the Charter, adopted in 1982, does not mention it. Canada’s Constitution does not protect property rights.

Except for Aboriginal property. Trudeau’s 1968 paper made no mention of Aboriginal rights, nor did drafts leading up to the 1980 proposal. Aboriginal groups and their supporters launched a campaign to have Aboriginal rights recognized. They succeeded just in time. Section 35, essentially an afterthought, recognized and affirmed the “existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” That section was put into the Constitution but not as part of the Charter. That might sound like section 35 is weaker than a Charter right, but it’s the opposite.

Section 35 affirms Aboriginal rights that existed as of 1982. But since 1982, the Supreme Court of Canada has used section 35 to champion, enlarge and reimagine Aboriginal rights. The Court has “discovered” rights never recognized in the law before 1982. In 1997, it articulated a new vision of Aboriginal title. In 2004, it established the Crown’s “duty to consult.” In 2014, it recognized Aboriginal title over a tract of Crown land.  In 2021, it gave Aboriginal rights under section 35 to an American Indigenous group.

Now the B.C. court in the Cowichan decision has said that Aboriginal title takes precedence over private property. Last November, a judge of the New Brunswick King’s Bench suggested similarly. Where a claim of Aboriginal title succeeds over land held in fee simple, she said, the court may instruct the government to expropriate the private property and hand it over to the Aboriginal group.

Governments and legislatures have shown little inclination to turn back these developments. But even if they wanted to, the Constitution stands in the way.

Section 33 of the Charter, the “Notwithstanding clause” (NWC), allows provincial legislatures and the federal Parliament to enact legislation notwithstanding the Charter rights guaranteed in sections 2 and 7 to 15. That means that they can pass statutes that might infringe these Charter rights. Use of the NWC clause prevents courts from striking down the statute as unconstitutional. The main part of the NWC reads:

33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

Section 35 is not part of the Charter. It is not subject to the NWC. Legislatures cannot ignore it, legislate around it, or change its meaning. Barring a constitutional amendment, courts have exclusive domain over the scope and application of section 35. In the constitutional hierarchy, Aboriginal rights rest above the “fundamental freedoms” and rights of the Charter.

Lest there was any doubt about that status, section 25 of the Charter spells it out. Charter rights and freedoms, the section says, “shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada.”

That does not mean that Aboriginal rights are absolute. Legislation or government action may sometimes infringe Aboriginal rights. But courts, not legislatures, control when, where, and under what circumstances that can happen. The Supreme Court of Canada has established the process and criteria by which governments must justify infringements of section 35 to the courts’ satisfaction.

Section 35, like much of the rest of the Constitution, is subject to an onerous amending formula. It cannot be easily changed or repealed.

Bruce Pardy

Professor of Law, Queen’s University