It turns out that an outburst by a rock star can shake the oil establishment and the Government of Canada a lot stronger than thousands of pages of scientific studies and academic reports on the environmental damage inflicted by the development of oil sands in northern Alberta.
As almost everybody in Canada has heard by now, rock idol Neil Young blasted the oil companies and the federal government for allowing irreversible damage to be done to the environment and trampling on the treaty rights of the First Nations affected by the exploitation of oil sands.
Commentators and government spokespeople have been lining up to fire their salvoes against the rocker since Young first made his statement with regard to his concert tour to raise funds for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), which aims to protect its land against oil sands development. All the funds raised through the concert series will be dedicated to the legal battle that APCN has been waging to be able to keep its traditional way of living.
Most of the pundits ridicule the singer’s likening of oil sands territory to Hiroshima after fall of the atomic bomb and accuse him of failing to get his facts straight.
But when it comes to facts, there are so many conflicting numbers, statistics and data as to how much money goes to First Nations from oil sands development, how First Nations businesses benefit from the industry and how much improvement has been made in environmental restoration work following the extraction oil from the soil.
But not one commentator, either from the government side or from the big oil, have said that the treaty rights of APCN have not been violated, because they have been, period.
The issue here is something above and beyond money, something both the big oil and governing political party which relies a lot on the funding from it would like to have forgotten, as eloquently stated by Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Shawn A-in-chut Atleo: "The fundamental issue here is the respect and recognition of First Nations rights, Treaties and title."
Government of Stephen Harper issued an apology in June 2008 to all First Nations for the practices employed in residential schools for almost a century, from 1870 to early 1970’s.
But almost six years on, the same leadership under Stephen Harper is engaged in an effort to introduce another education system that most First Nations categorically reject; AFN has recently withdrawn from talks with Ottawa on identifying some serious treaty issues to be resolved and oil sands development continues to become a bigger threat against the culture and lifestyle of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, among others.
One cannot help but wonder if the apology of June 2008 was just an attempt to sugarcoat a bitter pill that was intended for the First Nations to swallow.
Government of Canada, itself, will have some serious legal battles ahead as the Arctic continues to slowly melt away and more maritime traffic starts to flow through waters of the Arctic Ocean and more sections of the continental shelf and offshore areas become available for deep-sea resource exploitation because Russia, Denmark and the U.S., among others, will claim their rights to explore and mine resources in those waters.
How credibly can, then, the Canadian government defend its rights under the existing treaties and covenants if it doesn’t observe the treaties that it has signed with its own people?