Two hundred and fifty people jammed into a meeting hall in downtown Vancouver on May 21, 2014 to learn about the plans of the global natural gas industry and the British Columbia government to massively expand the production and export of natural gas from the northeast of the province. Below is the speech delivered to the meeting by Grand Chief Stewart Philip of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, transcribed and published with permission.

The meeting was organized by the Wilderness Committee and the Council of Canadians. Seven speakers delivered impassioned pleas to oppose what they see as economic, social and environmental madness underlying the whole natural gas scheme. View  the full, two hour recording of the public forum ‘LNG Pipedreams’ here. View the video recording of the presentation by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip here.

On June 8, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs organized a rally and march through the streets of downtown Vancouver under the theme, ‘Convergence 2014: Protecting our sacred waters from tar sands oil’. Read the Vancouver Observer report of that event here.

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Speech by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs to the ‘LNG Pipedreams’ conference at SFU Harbour Centre in Vancouver,May 21 2014

I want to begin by acknowledging the Coast Salish peoples, namely the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh. I would also like to thank the organizers in the Council of Canadians and Wilderness Committee for the kind invitation and bringing us all together to have this important conversation.

I’ve heard it said in the past that there is a certain advantage to being the final speaker. You simply thank everybody for coming and ask the last person to turn the lights out. (laughter) But the reason I came down tonight, is very much what the last speaker had to say.

I’ve been blessed with six adult children, and they in turn have blessed Joan and myself with fourteen incredibly beautiful grandchildren. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, and that’s what energizes me to drive to all points of the compass, and all throughout the province of British Columbia. I’ve been involved in the issues of our people for the last forty years and I’ve seen an enormous amount of change and transformation in those last four decades. I’ve seen incredible change, yet at the same time, I’ve seen other things get worse.

I’m speaking of the great peril that Mother Earth finds herself in at this point in human history. And I very much believe, that, as a lot of scientists, and environmentalists and Indigenous spiritual leaders have said for a very long time now, that we are indeed at the tipping point.

We heard an hour or so ago the Premier get up, and of course the party line of the BC Liberals is “It’s a generational opportunity”. LNG is a generational opportunity. I don’t believe that for a moment.*

I believe what we are presented with is the most incredible challenge of our generation--to stand up, to mobilize, to organize, to defend the natural values that we all treasure and have taken for granted, for a very, very long time. We’ve all been blessed with the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. We’ve taken our children out into the wilderness and out into the bush, and we’ve enjoyed that natural beauty. We just assumed that it’s going to be there forever.

With what we witness here tonight and what we’ve heard, and what we’re learning, the only way that our grandchildren will enjoy the same legacy that was left to us is if we do what the last speaker talked about. We absolutely have to stand up, be counted, organize, mobilize, and fill rooms like this, over and over and over again, so that we are able to popularize what’s happening.

I think by and large, society has been completely taken in by the corporate, what we know as BS, the propaganda, the marketing, the bombardment of advertisements we hear, twenty four/seven. We heard the Premier talking about LNG being clean energy, a clean industry, and we know that is absolutely not the truth.

I think we need to be absolutely visible. We have to be heard, we have to be loud. We have to be proud. We have to be out in streets.

I know it’s a challenge to give up your time.

I was at a funeral of a very young person in Osoyoos just a few days ago. For those of you who don’t know, Chief Clarence Louie has been the chief there for 20 or 30 years. He talked about the responsibilities of leadership. He talked about what he described as “leadership time.” And he said leadership time is not nine to five, it’s not five days a week. Leadership time is when you contribute your own personal time to a cause, whatever that cause may be.

In this case, it’s about being able to educate the general public about the absolute horror story of LNG. Coming here tonight and seeing some of those presentations, it never occurred to me that it’s far, far worse than Enbridge and Kinder Morgan [tar sands pipelines and export terminals]

The Union of BC Indian Chiefs is mandated by resolution when our chiefs come together in assembly. As of late, our leaders - we represent over half of the First Nations in the province - our organization is growing in proportion to the threats to the homelands of our constituent communities and the failure on the part of the government of Canada to be able to provide anything other than hollow rhetoric and promises.

For those of you that have been following these issues, there have been three industry forums throughout the province on LNG. The last one was in Fort Nelson a few weeks ago. I had the honour and the opportunity to be there, and I can tell you it was life changing for me. And it was heart-breaking, because, like yourselves, I’ve heard about the devastation to the homelands of Treaty 8.

We had the opportunity to go up in a chopper and to go over the basins. It took a few hours. It was absolutely heartbreaking. There’s no other way to describe it, to actually see it, to see how devastating LNG is to the landscape and how it’s completely fractured the land. I’m told that at nighttime, the lights of the gas plants and the wells makes it look like the Lower Mainland.

When you see it like that, it’s so hard to talk about.  All the time we were up in the air, I desperately looked for a moose or a deer, some sign of wildlife, but I didn’t see anything.

So, it’s the Northeast - the economy of this province is being built on the destruction of the Northeast. The pipelines that are being contemplated by LNG will further destroy the North. We have a social responsibility, as human beings, as grandparents and parents, to lend our support to Treaty 8, to all of the people in the North that are fighting so valiantly to push back this agenda. And I think that we are making progress. I absolutely know that to be the case.

We had the dubious opportunity, I suppose, to meet with the new Minister of Natural Resources earlier today, this afternoon. We met in the very same room where we met former minister Joe Oliver, and I described that meeting as absolutely bizarre when that happened about a year ago.  He just simply repeated speaking points. There was no dialogue. There was no serious discussion of the issues at hand.

Today we sat across from Minister Rickford and we heard the same rhetoric, the same speaking points, the same arrogance, the same condescending manner that we should wake up, that we should smarten up and know and understand that the Government of Canada knows best, and that we should go along with this agenda.

It was a very tense adversarial meeting that we had today. So there is absolutely no way that they are even going to look at the Eyford report and the thirty-odd recommendations in that report which would require substantive investments to bring about those recommended interventions. They’re not about to do that.

They are looking for a shortcut to be able to get through the constitutional and legal minefield of the rights of the First Nations in this province. I had the sense that they are under tremendous pressure because I believe that both Canada and British Columbia are falling behind with respect to the international market situation. Premier Clark’s bogus notions of prosperity vis-à-vis LNG was a gimmick. It was an election gimmick and it was bogus from day one.

The news we heard today with respect to the Russia - China arrangement for natural gas exports is going to present a very embarrassing challenge for the Premier, to be able to try and assure the markets and potential investors that BC is somehow still in this race. I don’t believe that that is the case.

But nonetheless, we know that we will continue to fight these battles until such time that we have governments in place with a national and provincial vision that speaks to the interests of the people who have made their homes in this beautiful province, who have invested generations of their families’ lives in building a livelihood in tourism, in everything that speaks to the natural values and beauty of this province. And up to now, with these governments, we’ve been catering to outside interests, corporate interests. The interests of genuine British Columbians are being ignored and sacrificed.

So we have to mobilize. This has to become a popular struggle. I want to close by thanking each and every one of you for coming out tonight and so generously sharing of your time and hearing from our learned panel here.

I want to also end by acknowledging the Treaty 8 chiefs, who have demonstrated incredible leadership over the last decade or two with respect to this fight against oil and gas, against Site C....So, again I thank everyone for coming out.

* The ‘LNG Pipedreams’ public forum where Chief Phillip and others spoke coincided with a natural gas industry promotion conference that the BC government was holding in Vancouver.

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