Corporations calling for energy projects to be declared in the “national interest” could put land defenders at risk

Published by Brent Patterson on March 30, 2025March 30, 2025

Photo: In April 2015, Public Safety Canada’s Government Operations Centre (GOC) reportedly saw Unist’ot’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline as a risk to Canada’s “national interest”. By January 2019, “Canadian police were prepared to shoot Indigenous land defenders blockading construction of  [the Coastal GasLink pipeline] in northern British Columbia, according to documents seen by the Guardian.”

The chief executive officers of eight Canadian energy companies, including the CEOs of Calgary-based TC Energy Corp. and Enbridge Inc., have sent this open letter on “how Canadian energy can help strengthen Canada’s economic sovereignty” to the leaders of the four major political parties in Canada.

The letter from these CEOs highlights: “By declaring a Canadian energy crisis and key projects in the ‘national interest’, the federal government will be able to use all its available emergency powers to ensure that the dramatic regulatory restructuring required to expand the oil and natural gas sector is rapidly achieved.”

This “national interest” framing could lead to the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders who seek to uphold their right to free, prior and informed consent and their sovereignty over unceded territories against extractive megaprojects.

In January 2019, Justin Brake wrote in The Narwhal about a report (titled “Strategic Incapacitation of Indigenous Dissent: Crowd Theories, Risk Management, and Settler Colonial Policing”) by Jeffrey Monaghan of Carleton University and Miles Howe of Queen’s University that “paint[s] a picture of how government departments, police, intelligence agencies and private sector interests work together to compile intelligence on activists — including Indigenous land defenders — and rate them according to the risk they pose to ’critical infrastructure’ such as pipelines, and to Canada’s ‘national interest’.”

C-IRG raids on Wet’suwet’en territory

The article by Brake was published in the days following the first Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) raid on Wet’suwet’en territory on January 8, 2019, that resulted in the arrest of 14 people.

Brake writes: “As part of their research Monaghan and Crosby uncovered previously classified documents on the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation … including a Government Operations Centre (GOC) report … [that] included revealing language, including reference to the pipeline as ‘critical infrastructure’ and ‘risk to the national interest resulting from a blockade or protest against the proposed TransCanada Coastal Gaslink liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline’ (which at the time they determined was ‘medium-low’).”

The proposed PRGT pipeline

The letter from the CEOs to the political party leaders highlights: “There is increasing public support to urgently grow our energy sector and build energy infrastructure, including new oil and natural gas pipelines and LNG terminals, to expand Canada’s energy exports.”

This could include the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline, a proposed 800-kilometre pipeline from northeastern British Columbia that would move between 2 billion and 3.6 billion cubic feet of fracked gas per day to a floating liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal on Nisga’a land on Pearse Island.

Gitanyow resistance

We are following the resistance of Indigenous land defenders to the PRGT pipeline, including the blockade on unceded Gitanyow lax’yip (territory) in northern British Columbia.

On a PBI-Canada webinar held on March 5, 2024, Tara Marsden, Wilp sustainability director for Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, commented: “Our learning is that consent only works when we say yes, if we say no, even if we say no with science behind us, and our knowledge and our laws behind us, then we will be met with force from the C-IRG, from militarized invasion and occupation and intimidation and harassment.”

We continue to follow this.

Further reading: When “national interest” and “national security” militarize the response to an environmental struggle (PBI-Canada, January 18, 2022).