By Wendy Kaur

Copyright thewalrus

For all his talk of reconciliation, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push to accelerate the next wave of nation building has exposed a familiar fault line in Canadian politics: when economic ambition collides with Indigenous consent, ambition usually wins.

The First Nations Major Projects Summit in Gatineau this July made that painfully clear. The event did nothing to alleviate the grievances of First Nations leaders. If anything, the two-day session—convened because of backlash over Bill C-5, which gives Ottawa final say on infrastructure projects deemed “in the national interest”—was viewed as a sign of government doubling down.

In a scathing statement, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs said the summit’s “sole purpose” was to serve notice that the bill “is now the law of the land” and that First Nations should “fully accept and accommodate that reality.” Chief of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, Craig Nootchtai, went further, calling the event “a subjugation.”

There’s plenty to be alarmed about. Born in the heat of US president Donald Trump’s trade war, and out of the scramble to assert some measure of economic independence in an uncertain world, Bill C-5 is dressed in the language of efficiency. Should a mine or pipeline be judged vital to Canada, the nation won’t wait. That speed comes, in part, from creating a single, expedited regulatory process.

However, critics warn rushing those shovels into the ground means skipping early assessment phases, awarding broad powers to the cabinet to ignore existing environmental protections, and shrinking First Nations consultation. In practice, the new law views hard-won safeguards for Indigenous communities and their land as little more than red tape.

Mandy Gull-Masty understands the worry. If the conference had been held a couple of months earlier, she would have been sitting in the audience, rather than taking her place beside the prime minister. Before her appointment as Indigenous services minister in May, Gull-Masty was the grand chief of the Crees. “I’ve been in challenging spots as an Indigenous leader working with the government trying to understand what their objective is,” she told me as she prepared to fly to Inuvik to meet with the Inuit–Crown Partnership Committee. The meeting itself was a bit of damage control: to calm fears that Bill C-5, with its vision of progress at any cost, wouldn’t ride roughshod over modern treaties and to reassure that everything would be done in full co-operation.

Not everyone is convinced by those assurances. Leah Gazan, member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre as well as belonging to the Wood Mountain Lakota Nation, tells me “the sweeping decision-making power” that the new legislation gives to a handful of officials is highly problematic for First Nations that have negotiated modern claims settlements. She points to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. Among other things, it protects hunting, fishing, and trapping rights and was established in partnership with the Grand Council of the Crees—which Gull-Masty herself had recently led. “In that agreement, they actually have their own environmental processes,” Gazan explains. “It’s based on both colonial and Cree law.” The new grand chief, she said, wrote a letter to the government outlining how Bill C-5 violates those terms.

Gull-Masty says she can’t comment on the letter. “But I want to be clear: We are not taking away environmental processes under Bill C-5. We are refining them. It’s up to the nation to determine if it wants to participate,” she says emphatically, referring to bringing a development project forward. “Be it modern land claims, be it treaty, be it unceded territory. If you decide it’s in your interest to participate, the mechanism for environmental assessment is still in place. It just means it will be refined with one process.”

Gull-Masty frames Bill C-5 as a win-win: development done faster, with environment and Indigenous rights intact. But organizations such as the Canadian Cancer Society have called out the way the law’s vague wording could allow provincial standards to override federal ones, raising alarms that weaker rules could reintroduce banned products such as asbestos. “Federally, it’s illegal to use asbestos, but that’s not true in some provinces,” says Gazan. It has been standard practice for the federal government to consult with civil groups and environmental organizations around projects they would fund. Bypassing those consultations in the interest of speed, she argues, “could be putting workers at risk by approving weaker environmental standards.”

It makes some wonder: Was the bill really a defensive move against Trump’s tariff barrage, or was the Carney government eyeing Canada’s natural riches from the start? “It’s both, and there’s a name for it,” says Senator Marilou McPhedran, who, in late June, put forth a list of amendments to the bill before the Senate—all of which were defeated. “It’s called disaster capitalism.” That’s when leaders take advantage of a crisis to push policies they couldn’t otherwise pass.

No one is disputing the impact of tariffs—economists warn Canada is already in “recession territory”—but Gazan believes there’s a bigger story behind Bill C-5. “Carney came out of the gate looking at the resource extraction industry, and Trump’s tariffs were the best excuse to fast-track the bill.”

Similarly, Ontario’s ambitions in the Ring of Fire illustrate how governments frame mineral wealth as urgency. The Treaty 9 area, with its vast deposits of nickel and chromite, is one of the reasons Premier Doug Ford was trying to push through Bill 5—the province’s counterpart legislation to Bill C-5—without the consent and consultation of Indigenous nations. The day before the summit, the premier tried to deflect sidelining their treaty rights in a multi-billion-dollar resource project, claiming he treats Indigenous leaders “like gold, but they keep coming hat in hand”—a statement he later apologized for.

“It was a most racist comment,” Gazan says. “Carney is smoother than Ford,” she continues, but both bills share the same assumption that Indigenous lands are there for the taking.

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The notion that Carney can’t be trusted doesn’t square with how some Indigenous leaders saw him at the summit. “I had a lot of feedback from Indigenous leadership and colleagues who were impressed with what he said,” Gull-Masty says. “He was open, blunt, and direct in saying he knows there’s history, and he knows there are issues with the Indigenous relationship with the government, but that he hears them and is bringing them to a space where they also have to understand that we are in unprecedented times. We have to protect ourselves.”

Carney made it clear that he won’t make any changes to Bill C-5. Tariffs are reshaping the Canadian economy. Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. “I have never seen trade wars escalate on a weekly, even daily, basis,” Gull-Masty says. “Canadian steel and aluminum industries are impacted by that. We’re not just thinking about the workers in these industries losing their jobs and companies losing contracts; we’re thinking about the supply chain of that material and what it means when buildings don’t have steel, for example. For me, I’m taking that very personally.”

Fast-tracking projects will not help the economy, counters Gazan. “It’s a fast track into the Supreme Court. We know that there are numerous Supreme Court rulings against projects and any sort of development when they have failed in their constitutional obligation to obtain full consent from Indigenous peoples.” Indeed, days before the summit, nine First Nations in Ontario sought court-ordered injunctions that would prevent the federal and provincial governments from using laws to speed up infrastructure projects. This federal government has spent millions fighting Indigenous people in courts, she says. “I suspect that number is going to rise significantly with C-5.”

The government’s agenda may be to push forward projects, adds Gazan, but they are also responsible for upholding the rule of law. “That includes our Constitution—something the Liberal government is trampling on. This will slow down—not fast-track—progress.”

Canada was built on the idea that we would share resources, not that one party would take everything, says Naomi Sayers, an Anishinaabe lawyer from Garden River First Nation. Sayers’s practice focuses on environmental, energy, and regulatory law; she has extensive experience advising governments on Indigenous rights. “Now, because of years of pushing and leaving Indigenous people out, we have extensive litigation as a result,” she tells me. “The courts are beginning to recognize the implications of leaving Indigenous people out and not delivering on the promises they made—whether Ontario or federal.”

Sayers points to the Robinson Huron Treaty territory, a vast region where treaties were signed with twenty-one nations with the intention of sharing benefits from mining and forestry across the islands and long shoreline along Lake Huron. “This never came to be,” she says. As a result, a $10 billion settlement in 2023 between the First Nations, Canada, and Ontario was agreed upon in order to compensate for past losses related to revenue. “The courts are not automatically accepting whatever the government—whether federal or provincial—says goes anymore.”

That history of broken promises in the Robinson Huron Treaty territory underscores why Bill C-5 has stirred so much unease. “The way the legislation was passed was so quick, with little democratic oversight or committee input,” says Sayers. Now the next steps aren’t clear, and the prime minister’s office has been engaging in post-facto consultations with first ministers and Indigenous leaders over the summer. At the heart of the concern is its vague invocation of the “national interest”—its catch-all justification for bulldozing through projects. “There are still questions about what that even means,” says Sayers.

She can see how the federal and provincial governments are trying to show themselves as strong and united to the US. “But the fact that you have an entire section of society negatively impacted by these decisions—well, the way this is happening is not new,” she says. “This is what Canada has always done.”

As an Indigenous person, Gull-Masty knows that there were challenges in how Bill C-5 came about. “There’s always room for improvement,” the minister acknowledges. “I take that as feedback.” But she also sees participation shaping the policy process. “I think Bill C-5 is open enough that you can really define the protocol that you want to implement in partnership coming to the table, being a voice at the table, determining what your project is, what your expectations are, and how you want to come into this space to work with investors.”

Gull-Masty says that she learned something from the summit. “It taught me, as a minister, the importance of ensuring when we communicate information that it is really clear. Some of the things were maybe not clear enough,” she says. “The biggest takeaway was the clarity.”

She can also empathize with the dilemmas that First Nations leaders are facing with C-5. “As a former Indigenous leader myself, I’ve asked the question: ‘Does this align with the objective of my nation?’” says Gull-Masty. “But sometimes when you’re in the leadership space, you have to make decisions for the future of your nation. These are often decisions that won’t be immediately understood.”

Interestingly, the minister believes her own nation—despite sending a letter in opposition to the law—could actually be a model in showcasing how a well-constructed process can support pushing projects forward at a quicker pace. “When I look at my nation, they’re very innovative,” she says. The Grand Council of the Crees, in Eeyou Istchee, Quebec, is recognized not only for its role in establishing Canada’s first modern Indigenous land claim agreement but also for pursuing their inherent rights through legal and political action. Case in point: their role in upholding the constitutionality of Bill C-92, the federal law that recognized Indigenous peoples’ right to self-government and jurisdiction over their child and family services. “The opportunity is afforded to them, and it’s really up to the leadership there to determine how they want to come to the table.”

Gull-Masty remains steadfast that the legislation is an opportunity, one that she’s never seen being offered in the way that it is. The Métis summit, the last of the three Indigenous summits this summer meant to ease concerns, was held on August 7. Some Métis groups said that they weren’t invited, while others boycotted. Still, according to CBC reporting, President Dave Lamouche of the Métis Settlements General Council—the central government for eight Métis settlements in Alberta—said the meeting was positive and productive and a good start: “We sense that all Métis Leaders are supporting the Build Canada bill.”

For Gull-Masty, the takeaway was encouraging. “I really get the sense that the prime minister is open to work in partnership,” she says. “I have faith in the next step.”