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 Kenneth P. Green

Earlier this month, when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that her government, in conjunction with major players in the oilsands, would propose a pipeline to carry Alberta’s products to tidewater off Canada’s west coast, she may have called the Carney government’s bluff (and the bluff of any other government that might be bluffing about pipelines).

In June, the Carney government passed Bill C-5 to purportedly eliminate the gridlock that prevents the construction of major energy infrastructure. But the government’s first list of projects to get the Bill C-5 treatment did not include any oil or gas pipelines (which was no surprise, in light of Canada’s hostile regulatory landscape that deters private-sector companies from investing time and money). In response to Smith’s announcement, federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said any proposal for a pipeline must include “meaningful consultations with Indigenous rights holders” and close partnerships with “all affected jurisdictions.”

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, one of those “affected jurisdictions,” Premier David Eby is essentially denying that Smith’s proposal has significant private-sector support, implying it will require federal spending and that it’s a “direct threat to the kind of economy we are trying to build.” And yet, back in June, Eby said he was open to the idea of another privately-funded pipeline to tidewater in northern B.C., noting only that he doesn’t support “tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidy going to build this new pipeline when we already own a pipeline that empties into British Columbia,” referring to the Trans Mountain pipeline. In other words, it sounds like Eby has changed his tune.

In Quebec, Premier François Legault said in February that his government might be open to a proposed oil pipeline (Energy East) from Alberta—“For the moment, there is no project on the table,” he said. “If there is a project on the table, we will look at it.” Fast-forward to today. When asked about Smith’s proposal, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, Yves-François Blanchet (a close ally of Legault’s), said “Let’s imagine that Quebec is an independent and free country. We will go on the world stage to say that Alberta is destroying the environment of the whole planet.”

Clearly, while the federal government and key provincial governments have implied that they’re open to new pipelines (albeit, under an ever-changing roster of conditions), Premier Smith’s proposal has seemingly revealed the truth. They sound like the same implacable opponents of oil and gas development, in submission to the international climate change movement’s zero-tolerance policy for fossil fuels, that have dominated in Canada for a decade.