Will pro-development First Nations ever get a fair hearing? It is rare enough in Canada, and it certainly never happens in foreign reporting.
In Australia’s ABC News this week, a feature was published that follows Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Na’Moks and Gitxsan leader Gwii Lok’im Gibuu Jesse Stoeppler. They were visiting Western Australia’s Murujuga rock art site, of great importance to local Aboriginal communities, with a warning that Canada is “putting itself on the same path” by expanding the liquefied natural gas industry.
ABC’s report has drawn a straight line between a controversial hotspot of Australian natural gas and the LNG industry in British Columbia. It unsurprisingly left out important facts on the public record that undermine the whole narrative, related to Canadian major projects, decisions by different First Nations, and Ottawa’s new strategy for development.
The ABC report noted that the progressive Western Australian government and Woodside Energy stated that there is “no conclusive evidence” that industrial emissions have damaged the petroglyphs at Murujuga. Meanwhile, other critics have insisted that the rock art is at risk.
That debate may be real, but it has not concluded.
The state-funded scientific study, the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program, has gathered enough evidence to establish interim thresholds for “safe air quality,” and to rebut simple “acid rain” explanations. Some researchers have still insisted that industrial pollution is accelerating weathering in the area.
Murujuga was listed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List in July, and its advisers urged that limits be placed on future local industrial expansion, along with tighter emissions controls.
In other words, even in Australia the story is more multi-layered than a convenient “industry versus heritage” framing. Taking that contested landscape and turning it into an equally simple warning label for Canada is to import a debate, rather than reckon with a full set of facts.
Narrative of exploited BC LNG ‘mostly fictional’
The ABC piece describes Canada’s LNG industry as “only now starting to develop,” implying that it constitutes some sort of late, rushed set of projects. The first large-scale Canadian LNG export did only leave Kitimat this year, when the Shell-led LNG Canada project loaded its maiden cargo in June.
However, that maiden voyage was more than a decade in the making.
Cedar LNG, also based in Kitimat, and Woodfibre LNG in Squamish have been under construction for years, and the expansion of the LNG Canada project has been categorised as a priority project by Ottawa.
These are hardly comparable to the 1970s-era industrial developments at Murujuga. The new Canadian LNG projects are being designed to largely run on British Columbia-generated hydroelectricity, with Ksi Lisims LNG, Cedar and Woodfibre. All three are promoted as low-emitting, almost entirely electrified facilities built in partnership with both industry and First Nations.
ABC portrays the entire story as one of companies and governments “creating appetite where there is none on a local landscape.” That framing can be described as mostly fictional, and impossible to reconcile with what is really happening in northern British Columbia.
Over in Australia, the Murujuga World Heritage nomination was led by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, whose board backed World Heritage status and continues to negotiate industrial conditions. In Canada, LNG has been shaped by Indigenous people, not by their opponents.
First Nations are central partners in resource projects
The LNG Canada project exists on Haisla Nation territory, and the Haisla are contractually central partners. In 2023, the project had awarded 3.5 billion dollars in contracts to British Columbia firms. Almost 3 billion of those dollars went to Indigenous-owned and local businesses.
Along the Coastal GasLink pipeline corridor, which supplies gas to the Kitimat facilities, all 20 elected First Nations governments along the route have signed agreements for benefit sharing and the option of a 10 percent equity stake.
The second project mentioned by the ABC report, Ksi Lisims LNG, is not simply a corporate venture “driven by a consortium of gas companies.” Ksi Lisims is a partnership in which the Nisga’a Nation is both a backer and landowner, together with the Rockies LNG consortium and Western LNG, on Nisga’a Treaty lands near Gingolx.
Decision-makers in Ottawa have described the approval of the Ksi Lisims project as an example of economic reconciliation, and an expression of self-determination by the Nisga’a. The Nisga’a themselves have welcomed the project’s categorization as a project in Canada’s national interest.
Focusing on just two visiting leaders from Nations who oppose those specific projects, the ABC report has misrepresented the real situation in B.C. Readers will not know Indigenous governments have repeatedly and publicly asked for these LNG projects to proceed.
Generations of negotiations are paying off
ABC writes that the 900-kilometre pipeline that would pipe gas to Ksi Lisims LNG would “slice through other Indigenous nations’ lands” that “have not consented.” The Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT), is in fact an 800 to 900-kilometre line, with an environmental certificate affirmed by regulators following inspections and consultations with affected First Nations.
PRGT’s ownership now includes the Nisga’a and Western LNG, reflecting a model in which some Nations were both consulted and given seats at the table. Opposition obviously exists, but it flies in the face of ABC’s assertion that the appetite for LNG was “manufactured” from the top down.
Ottawa was described in the article as “desperate” to push through mining and infrastructure because of “unpredictable tariff policies” from the Trump administration. An examination of the new Major Projects Office by Reuters framed the move as a strategic one to reduce onerous, decade-long approval timelines, in addition to diversifying export markets and reducing reliance on trade with the United States, rather than a short-term scramble.
None of this can be credibly reduced to parliaments and governments “creating interest where there is none.”
One accurate aspect of the ABC story is that some, but hardly all, Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan leaders oppose natural gas development.
But it does not acknowledge the Indigenous governments that have spent a generation negotiating agreements, equity stakes and environmental conditions for LNG projects, which have little in common with Murujuga’s older gas operations, from any number of perspectives, be it technological, environmental or political.
Fortunately, Canada’s fledgling LNG cargoes will continue to set sail, and more Indigenous-led projects will advance, with no regard to what has happened or is happening in Australia.