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Energy

First Nations Buy Into Pipelines

Published

8 months ago

9 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Zinchuk

“Meaningful Indigenous participation in our resource economy is maturing. At first, First Nations used to ask for compensation, the jobs, and then for the contracts that created those jobs, Now they seek purchase equity in the project itself. Soon they will create the project and seek others to invest in it. Then they will have real economic power.”

It’s taken years to get here, but there’s a new trend in Canada’s pipeline industry, and it couldn’t come soon enough. That’s because the path we’ve been on until now has been one to ruin.

On July 30, TC Energy announced it was in the process of selling 5.34 per cent of its Nova Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL) System and the Foothills Pipeline assets for a gross purchase price of $1 billion. “The Agreement is backed by the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC) and was negotiated by a consortium committee (Consortium) representing specific Indigenous Communities (Communities) across Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. This results in an implied enterprise value of approximately $1.65 billion, inclusive of the proportionate share of the Partnership Assets’ collective debt,” TC Energy said.

This comes a few months after its March 14 announcement to sell “all outstanding shares in Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Holdings Ltd. and the limited partnership interests in Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Limited Partnership (collectively, PRGT). PRGT is a wholly owned subsidiary of TC Energy and the developer of a natural gas pipeline project in British Columbia and potential delivery corridor that would further unlock Canada as a secure, affordable and sustainable source of LNG.”

The Nova system sale is significant. It’s the principal natural gas gathering system throughout Alberta and a bit into B.C. In addition to supplying Alberta with its gas needs, Nova, in turn, feeds the TC Energy Mainline. It also supplies Saskatchewan via Many Islands Pipe Lines and TransGas, both subsidiaries of SaskEnergy. And since Saskatchewan’s domestic gas production keeps falling, we now rely heavily on Alberta gas to keep our furnaces lit and our new gas fired power plants turning, keeping the lights on. When you look at the Nova map, it’s basically the map of Alberta.

Some of the most significant difficulties in getting major pipeline projects built in this country over the last 16 years has been Indigenous opposition. One of the first stories I wrote about with Pipeline News during the summer of 2008 was a First Nations protest on the Enbridge right of way at Kerrobert, complete with a teepee. That was for the Alberta Clipper project, but it was relatively quickly resolved.

Then there was Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project, which was approved by the Conservative federal government but halted by the courts because of insufficient Indigenous consultation. It was ultimately killed very early into the Trudeau-led Liberal administration, when he said, “The Great Bear Rainforest was no place for a pipeline, a crude pipeline.”

Northern Gateway would have terminated at Kitimat. Yet, curiously enough, that same forest had to be crossed to built the TC Energy Coastal GasLink project. It went grossly overbudget in no small part due to delays and resistance in every manner possible from the Wet’suweten in northern B.C. As Canadian Press reported on Dec. 11, 2023, “By the time the pipeline was finished, its estimated construction cost had ballooned from $6.6 billion to $14.5 billion.”

And then there was Trans Mountain Expansion. It had opposition from the BC government, City of Burnaby, and everyone who could apply a Sharpie marker to a Bristol board. But Indigenous opposition was a major factor. As Pipeline Online reported via the Canadian Press, “The project’s $34-billion price tag has ballooned from a 2017 estimate of $7.4 billion, with Trans Mountain Corp. blaming the increase on “extraordinary” factors including evolving compliance requirements, Indigenous accommodations, stakeholder engagement, extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

By this spring, the number was $34 billion, and I anticipate its final cost will be higher still.

Maturing

There’s been a big change in recent years, not just in pipelines, but in other energy industries like wind and solar. That change had gone from consultation to jobs to equity investment.

The word used almost always is “reconciliation.” That can be a loaded word in many ways, Some feel it will heal wounds, and right past wrongs, or at least try to. Others would say it’s a form of extortion. And some take issue with racial overtones. But here’s something I heard this week that makes a lot of sense:

“Meaningful Indigenous participation in our resource economy is maturing. At first, First Nations used to ask for compensation, the jobs, and then for the contracts that created those jobs, Now they seek purchase equity in the project itself. Soon they will create the project and seek others to invest in it. Then they will have real economic power.”

That’s what Steve Halabura, professional geologist, told me. And he would know, since he’s been working with First Nations on this economic development front.

And you see that in the timeline I laid out. The 2008 protests were very much about compensation and jobs. Trans Mountain Expansion saw significant First Nations’ owned and operated firms awarded contracts. And now, they’re buying equity positions.

You know what? If First Nations bands, and people, do indeed become owners in these resource companies and infrastructure, if it helps pay for housing and water treatment plants, if it means meaningful work and paycheques, are they likely to fight the next project tooth and nail? Or will they want to be a part of it?

And think of it this way – if we could have gotten to this point ten years ago, maybe these projects might have gone much more smoothly. Maybe their final costs wouldn’t have been double, or quadruple, the original budget. When you think of it in that perspective – if a billion dollar equity stake meant Coastal GasLink could have cost $5 billion less, would it have been worth it to bring First Nations in as equity partners?

Some will say that’s extortion. Others would say it’s justice, or reconciliation. But maybe, just maybe, this is how we move forward, and everyone in the end wins. And maybe then Canada can, once again, build great things.

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].

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The Audit David Clinton

Contrasting the principle of equalization with the execution

Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light.

You’ll need to search long and hard to find a Canadian unwilling to help those less fortunate. And, so long as we identify as members of one nation¹, that feeling stretches from coast to coast.

So the basic principle of Canada’s equalization payments – where poorer provinces receive billions of dollars in special federal payments – is easy to understand. But as you can imagine, it’s not easy to apply the principle in a way that’s fair, and the current methodology has arguably lead to a very strange set of incentives.

According to Department of Finance Canada, eligibility for payments is determined based on your province’s fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is a measure of the taxes (income, business, property, and consumption) that a province could raise (based on national average rates) along with revenues from natural resources. The idea, I suppose, is that you’re creating a realistic proxy for a province’s higher personal earnings and consumption and, with greater natural resources revenues, a reduced need to increase income tax rates.

But the devil is in the details, and I think there are some questions worth asking:

  • Whichever way you measure fiscal capacity there’ll be both winners and losers, so who gets to decide?
  • Should a province that effectively funds more than its “share” get proportionately greater representation for national policy² – or at least not see its policy preferences consistently overruled by its beneficiary provinces?

The problem, of course, is that the decisions that defined equalization were – because of long-standing political conditions – dominated by the region that ended up receiving the most. Had the formula been the best one possible, there would have been little room to complain. But was it?

For example, attaching so much weight to natural resource revenues is just one of many possible approaches – and far from the most obvious. Consider how the profits from natural resources already mostly show up in higher income and corporate tax revenues (including income tax paid by provincial government workers employed by energy-related ministries)?

And who said that such calculations had to be population-based, which clearly benefits Quebec (nine million residents vs around $5 billion in resource income) over Newfoundland (545,000 people vs $1.6 billion) or Alberta (4.2 million people vs $19 billion). While Alberta’s average market income is 20 percent or so higher than Quebec’s, Quebec’s is quite a bit higher than Newfoundland’s. So why should Newfoundland receive only minimal equalization payments?

To illustrate all that, here’s the most recent payment breakdown when measured per-capita:
Equalization 2025-26 – Government of Canada

For clarification, the latest per-capita payments to poorer provinces ranged from $3,936 to PEI, $1,553 to Quebec, and $36 to Ontario. Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC received nothing.

And here’s how the total equalization payments (in millions of dollars) have played out over the past decade:

Is energy wealth the right differentiating factor because it’s there through simple dumb luck, morally compelling the fortunate provinces to share their fortune? That would be a really difficult argument to make. For one thing because Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light. Perhaps that stand is correct or perhaps it isn’t. But it’s a stand they probably couldn’t have afforded to take had the equalization calculation been different.

Of course, no formula could possibly please everyone, but punishing the losers with ongoing attacks on the very source of their contributions is guaranteed to inspire resentment. And that could lead to very dark places.

Note: I know this post sounds like it came from a grumpy Albertan. But I assure you that I’ve never even visited the province, instead spending most of my life in Ontario.

1

Which has admittedly been challenging since the former primer minister infamously described us as a post-national state without an identity.

2

This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds. After all, there are already formal mechanisms through which Indigenous communities get more than a one-person-one-vote voice.

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Banks

Wall Street Clings To Green Coercion As Trump Unleashes American Energy

Published on April 6, 2025

By

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Isaac

The Trump administration’s recent move to revoke Biden-era restrictions on energy development in Alaska’s North Slope—especially in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—is a long-overdue correction that prioritizes American prosperity and energy security. This regulatory reset rightly acknowledges what Alaska’s Native communities have long known: responsible energy development offers a path to economic empowerment and self-determination.

But while Washington’s red tape may be unraveling, a more insidious blockade remains firmly in place: Wall Street.

Despite the Trump administration’s restoration of rational permitting processes, major banks and insurance companies continue to collude in starving projects of the capital and risk management services they need. The left’s “debanking” strategy—originally a tactic to pressure gun makers and disfavored industries—is now being weaponized against American energy companies operating in ANWR and similar regions.

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This quiet embargo began years ago, when JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, declared in 2020 that it would no longer fund oil and gas development in the Arctic, including ANWR. Others quickly followed: Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup now all reject Arctic energy projects—effectively shutting down access to capital for an entire region.

Insurers have joined the pile-on. Swiss Re, AIG, and AXIS Capital all publicly stated they would no longer insure drilling in ANWR. In 2023, Chubb became the first U.S.-based insurer to formalize its Arctic ban.

These policies are not merely misguided—they are dangerous. They hand America’s energy future over to OPEC, China, and hostile regimes. They reduce competition, drive up prices, and kneecap the very domestic production that once made the U.S. energy independent.

This isn’t just a theoretical concern. I’ve experienced this discrimination firsthand.

In February 2025, The Hartford notified the American Energy Institute—an educational nonprofit I lead—that it would not renew our insurance policy. The reason? Not risk. Not claims. Not underwriting. The Hartford cited our Facebook page.

“The reason for nonrenewal is we have learned from your Facebook page that your operations include Trade association involved in promoting social/political causes related to energy production. This is not an acceptable exposure under The Hartford’s Small Commercial business segment’s guidelines.”

That’s a direct quote from their nonrenewal notice.

Let’s be clear: The Hartford didn’t drop us for anything we did—they dropped us for what we believe. Our unacceptable “exposure” is telling the truth about the importance of affordable and reliable energy to modern life, and standing up to ESG orthodoxy. We are being punished not for risk, but for advocacy.

This is financial discrimination, pure and simple. What we’re seeing is the private-sector enforcement of political ideology through the strategic denial of access to financial services. It’s ESG—Environmental, Social, and Governance—gone full Orwell.

Banks, insurers, and asset managers may claim these decisions are about “climate risk,” but they rarely apply the same scrutiny to regimes like Venezuela or China, where environmental and human rights abuses are rampant. The issue is not risk. The issue is control.

By shutting out projects in ANWR, Wall Street ensures that even if federal regulators step back, their ESG-aligned agenda still moves forward—through corporate pressure, shareholder resolutions, and selective financial access. This is how ideology replaces democracy.

While the Trump administration deserves praise for removing federal barriers, the fight for energy freedom continues. Policymakers must hold financial institutions accountable for ideological discrimination and protect access to banking and insurance services for all lawful businesses.

Texas has already taken steps by divesting from anti-energy financial firms. Other states should follow, enforcing anti-discrimination laws and leveraging state contracts to ensure fair treatment.

But public pressure matters too. Americans need to know what’s happening behind the curtain of ESG. The green financial complex is not just virtue-signaling—it’s a form of economic coercion designed to override public policy and undermine U.S. sovereignty.

The regulatory shackles may be coming off, but the private-sector blockade remains. As long as banks and insurers collude to deny access to capital and risk protection for projects in ANWR and beyond, America’s energy independence will remain under threat.

We need to call out this hypocrisy. We need to expose it. And we need to fight it—before we lose not just our energy freedom, but our economic prosperity.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is the Founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

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