Crown corporation CDEV ignores questions about Secwepemc land defenders at annual meeting on November 17

Photo: Ian Anderson, CEO of Trans Mountain Corporation, speaking at the annual meeting.

The virtual annual meeting of the Canada Development Investment Corporation (CDEV), the Government of Canada Crown corporation that owns the Trans Mountain pipeline, was held on Tuesday November 17.

The CDEV website had noted that representatives from its subsidiaries, including Trans Mountain Corporation, “will review the year and respond to questions [and that] every attempt will be made to answer them during the pre-recorded meeting.”

In response, hundreds of people submitted a question through this PBI-Canada urgent action online petition that stated:

“The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has called for the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline to be stopped, for the right to free, prior and informed consent to be respected, and for the RCMP to be withdrawn from Secwepemc traditional lands. Will you do so and uphold Canada’s commitments to the UN Convention on ending racism?”

Similarly, 350 Canada also mobilized to have people submit questions to this annual meeting. They generated 2,828 emails!

This 19-minute video of the CDEV annual meeting shows no indication of the questions raised by thousands of people being addressed.

And yet the CEO of Trans Mountain did highlight that it had opened “camp communities” in Valemount and Clearwater.

This despite the final report by National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluding: “Work camps, or man camps, associated with the resource extraction industry are implicated in higher rates of violence against Indigenous women at the camps and in the neighbouring communities.”

This Secwepemc Declaration also expresses profound concerns about camps resulting in increased sexualized violence against Indigenous women.

PBI-Canada is deeply disappointed by this.

Four land and environmental defenders have been killed every seek since the Paris climate agreement was reached at COP21 in Paris in December 2015.

More than one-third of those fatal attacks have been against Indigenous land defenders and water protectors.

We are now calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to commit to upholding the rights of Indigenous land defenders at the Climate Ambition Summit on December 12. You can join in this call by clicking on this URGENT ACTION today.

We further encourage you to read 350.org’s report titled: Human Rights Abuses by Fossil Fuel Companies. Their report connects with our accompaniment of the Front of Peoples in Defence of Land and Water (FPDTA) in Mexico and our accompaniment of organizations opposed to fracking in Colombia (where a Canadian company is likely to be awarded a contract next week). For excerpts from the 350.org report, please click here.