Four BC First Nations are joining three Alberta bands and one from Manitoba in a march to the Calgary headquarters of Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) this morning to protest the company’s Northern Gateway pipeline project at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
The march will be joined by traditional drummers and singers carrying a banner that says, “No pipelines without consent.”
The First Nations have signed a solidarity statement telling the Stephen Harper government that the Northern Gateway pipeline project must not proceed unless each First Nation gives its free, prior and informed consent.
“If Harper and Enbridge think this pipeline is a done deal because of the election result, they’ve got another think coming,” Nadleh Whut’en First Nation Chief Larry Nooski said in a press release.
The Nadleh Whut’en First Nation represents the Dakelh people, whose territory is in B.C.’s Central Interior.
“First Nations have used our ancestral laws to ban Enbridge’s pipelines and tankers from their lands, taking up more than half of the proposed pipeline and tanker route from the Rockies clear across to the Pacific Ocean,” he said.
“We’re united as never before, and now our brothers and sisters from Alberta are speaking out for the first time in solidarity with our position that we have the right to say no.”
He added, “Our nations are the wall this pipeline will not break through.”
The action is being led by the Yinka Dene Alliance, a group of five First Nations that collectively hold 25% of Enbridge’s proposed pipeline route in northern B.C.
In March, the Yinka Dene Alliance called on BMO Bank of Montreal to withhold financing from the Enbridge pipeline project. (See “First Nations call on BMO to withhold financing for Enbridge pipeline” – BIV Business Today, March 22.)
Jenny Wagler
Twitter: @JennyWagler_BIV