The Regional - February 2020

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THURSDAY February 13, 2020

Citizen photo by James Doyle Carrier Sekani Tribal Chief Mina Holmes speaks last week during the announcement of a new reconciliation agreement with the B.C. government.

Carrier Sekani and province reach $175 million deal Citizen staff even Carrier Sekani First Nations will share in $175 million under a five-year agreement signed Jan. 29 with the provincial government.

Dubbed Pathways Forward 2.0, it was described as an “historic partnership” that “promises to boost the economy in the entire Omineca region while

S

increasing self-determination for the signatory First Nations.”

Measures in the agreement include: - an economic development fund worth $70 million over five years to support business development, partnerships with neighbouring communities and joint ventures; - $40 million over five years to

accommodate for impacts on the land from forest and range activities in the territory; - $25 million over five years to build “capacity” to implement the agreement and continue negotiations on a long-term, comprehensive reconciliation agreement between CSFNs and the provincial and federal

governments; - $12.5 million over five years for programs to revitalize Carrier and Sekani languages and culture; - $12.5 million over five years to build on governance processes and structures, with a goal of full selfgovernment.

The First Nations will also receive $15 continued on pg 4

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Citizen Photo by James Doyle Long-time Northern Hardware employees Peter Mueller, right, and Dennis Busby are proud of their many years of service at Northern Hardware.

Longtime employees celebrate great years at The Northern Ted Clarke Citizen staff For 43 years, Peter Mueller has been doing his job selling store items at Northern Hardware and Furniture.

In just a few weeks, he will be unemployed.

In December, store president Kelly Green announced The Northern was going out of business due to a struggling regional economy, competition from big-box stores and online shopping, and a reluctance of people to shop downtown. Liquidation of the store’s stock began at the start of the new year and the doors will close permanently sometime in February.

By this time next month, that downtown Prince George retail cornerstone on Third Avenue will be nothing but an empty building. But for Mueller, memories of customers he’s served for more than four decades are permanently stored.

“Downtown has been slower over the years with other centres opening up west of town at Westgate, and they all took pieces of the pie from downtown,” said Mueller.

“Retail is a challenge for everyone. A lot of people shop online now. I remember Ted Moffat telling me 20 or 25 years ago, “Peter, there’s a change coming and they call it E-commerce and people will start shopping online through their computer.’

Now I see what he’s referring to.

“My boss, Kelly, has been thinking about it for a year or two. Her goal was for the store to reach 100 years and that was in March 2019 and from there it will be a new chapter in everyone’s lives.”

Fueled by the motto “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it,” Northern Hardware built a well-deserved reputation for stocking goods not available elsewhere in the city, whether it was an odd-sized bolt, a pickling crock or parts for a leather horse harness. Seasonal items were never far out of reach. Back in the days before the big-box stores arrived, where else could a customer go to find a garden rake in the dead of winter?

“Northern Hardware is very unique in that way, we belong to the Home Hardware

group for buying power, which has 1,200 stores, and not only that, we buy from other vendors across the country,” said Mueller.

“We were very unique in buying giftware, the ladies always looked after that and did a beautiful job during Christmas with a great housewares department we’ve had.

“When they heard we were closing, a lot of customers came in and they were very sad.

A lot of them came in almost in tears. A lot of the oldtimers are lost, ‘Where am I going to get my stuff?’”

Mueller remembers customers who brought kitchen sinks complete with the drain assembly and plopped them on the store counter while he found the replacement parts needed to fix it. He knows his way around a toolkit and has been called upon a few times in his career to repair the furnace at the store and troubleshoot the computer system. It was also Mueller’s job to keep Champion, the mechanical horse ride, in fine working condition.

“I’d get called if he was broken or stuck to get him going again,” said Mueller. “All the

young kids loved Champ. He was here for 70 years.”

The Northern began the year with 32 employees, half the staff that was there when Mueller started working as a 20-yearold on Oct. 5, 1976. They still take pride in the fact that no matter what time of day, there’s enough of them in the store so customers never have to wait long for someone to help them find an item or figure out how to fix something. That emphasis on staff quantity gave customers a shopping experience quality now virtually extinct in the retail world. It stoked a reputation the store has maintained right to the end.

“The Northern’s always been known for service, we would have a lot of staff on the floor and that brought in people who loved the service - it’s what made us different from all the other stores,” said Mueller.

“What I really enjoy is meeting different people, helping them sort it out. Each person has a different story and to hear their stories from over the years is very interesting. It’s always a treat for me to get continued on pg 4

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Carrier Sekani

Northern employees

“

All we really want for our communities is to thrive, and when our communities thrive our neighbours thrive, British Columbians and Canadians

million in 2020-21 for a wealth fund.

With Premier John Horgan in attendance, the agreement was signed at a packed Uda Dune Baiyoh (House of Ancestors) Conference Centre in Prince George.

It follows on an interim agreement, signed in April 2017, meant to increase its members First Nations’ participation in the forest economy.

The latest version also commits to bringing the federal government to the negotiations going forward. Priorities for continued negotiation of a long-term agreement include lands, forest tenure opportunities and implementation of rights and title.

“All we really want for our communities is to thrive, and when our communities

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continued from pg 1

thrive our neighbours thrive, British Columbians and Canadians,” Carrier Sekani Tribal Council Tribal Chief Mina Holmes said.

“This agreement helps bring our communities and members back into equitable balance, to help close the social and economic gaps between us and our neighbours.”

Signatories include the Stellat’en First Nation, Nadleh Whut’en, Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation, Saik’uz First Nation, Nak’azdli Whut’en, Takla Nation and Tl’azt’en Nation.

Their combined population is over 8,400 people and their combined territories span about 69,600 square kilometres - which is almost the size of New Brunswick, or 7.4 per cent of B.C.

to listen to them. The customers are like our family.”

Alex Moffat and Frank Whitmore opened the original store on George Street in 1919 as Northern Mercantile and right from the beginning they offered customers the opportunity to buy things on credit. It wasn’t uncommon for the store to allow customers to barter for goods and even take out small loans, deals sealed with handshakes and paper ledgers to be paid when they had the money. It was a store that had a big heart and that became even more apparent during the Great Depression.

Four generations of the Moffat family have operated the store, which has been at its current location at 1386 Third Ave. (a former apartment/retail block), since 1948. Alex passed the store on to his son, Harold, who handed it down to his son Ted Moffat. Green took over as president/chief executive officer in 2013, after her father Ted died, and she’s worked there since she was 16. Mike Springstead, The Northern’s purchaser, has been with the store for 40 years.

Mueller, the 63-year-old hardware manager, started in the bike shop and worked in sporting goods for about 15 years. After a stint in automotives, he’s been a familiar face behind the hardware counter for the past 25 years. Mueller’s sense of loyalty to the store means he’s never considered finding another job, until now.

“The staff is a big one, we have great staff and half of them are longterm staff,” he said. “The Northern has treated me well for 43 years. I love the people and I have patience. You have to be that way or else you’d be long gone. When someone comes

in for a plumbing project and you put it together for them and they’re amazed how well we did it and they walk away happy, that’s satisfaction for me.”

Mueller had wanted to work full time at the Northern for another two years, then switch to part-time work in the store. He says he’ll take a month or two off when the store closes and apply to work at one of the other hardware stores in the city.

Among The Northern’s other holdings are the Appliance Centre of First Avenue, which closed last summer, and Amco Wholesale, an industrial distributor of products for forestry, mining and construction. The wholesale store, operated

by Harold Moffat’s grandson Glen Blair, is also shutting down this month.

Dennis Busby, 56, who managed the Appliance Centre for the two decades of its existence was first hired by the store 30 years ago to work in the furniture department. He had to take a crash course in getting to know everything there was to know about the high-end Stressless brand of couches and recliners, tables and chairs they stocked, and his education continued when he switched to appliances. He saw countless examples of customer loyalty being handed down to younger generations within the same families.

“That’s why, when it was announced we were closing down, there was such an outpouring of the city of Prince George,” said Busby. “It was wall-to-wall people in here for three weeks, not just to shop for bargains but to say thank you and share their stories, their memories. It was very emotional for them and the staff.

“That’s what we were about, customer service, and people are going to miss that.”

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Teens speak out against vaping

Ted Clarke Citizen staff Owen MacDonald sees it way too often for his own liking.

He watches teens like himself walking to school or clustered in a field exhaling clouds of steam and it bothers him.

Compared to smoking, vaping is less harmful, but MacDonald knows it’s not harmless and that’s the focus of a presentation he and a group of other high school students are bringing to young students when they visit elementary schools.

“The message I want to get out to kids is it’s not cool to put anything other than oxygen into your lungs, and it’s actually harmful,” said MacDonald, a Grade 12 student at Duchess Park Secondary School who leads the anti-vaping initiative as part of the School District 57 District Student Advisory

Council.

“Vaping is better than smoking but both are pretty bad. It’s right in your face at school and everyone knows that a lot of people vape. The main thing I’m doing is helping elementary students make informed decisions on what they’re actually putting into their bodies and having them see the harms of it so they’ll know it’s not as harmless as people will have them think.”

In those school assemblies, MacDonald shows a news clip of 19-year-old Jaycen Stephens of Armstrong, who has filed a suit in BC Supreme Court against JUUL, the vaping cartridge manufacturer. JUUL makes small, easily-hidden devices for vaping that look like USB flash drives which contain concentrated doses of addictive nicotine and are often flavoured. Stephens started vaping when he was 16 and says it’s the

cause of his respiratory problems. He says he has a constant feeling of fluid in his lungs and is unable to run. The suit claims Stephens was unaware of the risks of vaping before he got hooked on it.

MacDonald has visited Heritage, College Heights and Pinewood elementary schools and the list of schools that want the advisory group to present to their students is growing, with visits to Heather Park and Buckhorn upcoming.

“I find when you’re talking to elementary kids about in-depth subjects such as the harms of vaping, you really need to be interactive,” said MacDonald. “If you’re just talking at them they’re not going to like it, but if you’re talking to them and having an interactive two-way conversation they really seem to grasp on to the subject a lot more.”

Each secondary school and five elementary schools in the city have at least two Student Advisory Council representatives and MacDonald will bring one or two with him when he makes his presentations.

“They started a week-and-a-half ago and just today, four other schools are trying to book these students,” said Katie Marren, vice-principal at D.P. Todd Secondary School.

It is against school rules to vape anywhere near school property and Marren says the problem of vaping has become more pervasive over the past two years. The liquid that makes the vapour is primarily vegetable glycerine and propylene glycol, commonly used in cosmetics and sweeteners. The devices use batteries to heat what is being consumed without burning or smoking the substance. There is no odour, so there’s no way to tell if what is being vaped is nicotine or marijuana.

“It’s definitely been a concern in all the secondary schools,” said Marren. “I guess that’s why I’m relieved that the students themselves want to do something about it.

It becomes less about us and adults making the rules and it’s more about students wanting to support other students’ wellness than it is about the rules.”

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More area kids in poverty, report says LORI CULBERT/Postmedia Mark NIELSEN/Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Nearly one in five children living in the Fraser-Fort George Regional District live in poverty, according to a report released last week.

First Call: B.C. Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition says 3,860 children, or about 19 per cent of those living in the FFGRD, live below the after-tax lowincome measure or 50 per cent of the adjusted median household income.

The proportion is about on par with the provincial average but up from 17 per cent reported two years ago. The numbers issued Tuesday are from 2017 Statistics Canada data - the most recent available.

It also says 52 per cent of children in lone-parent families in the FFGRD are under the mark, compared to 51 per cent for the province as a whole while seven per cent of children in two-parent families are in that situation, compared to 11 per cent for the province as a whole.

The poverty rate for all those living in the FFGRD stood at 15 per cent, compared to 18 per cent for the province.

In an interview, First Call provincial coordinator Adrienne Montani said the provincial NDP deserves credit for pledging to cut child poverty in half by 2024 but it will have to act with far more urgency in order to meet that target.

Montani said she remains “cautiously optimistic” for two reasons.

One is a pledge to fund the child opportunity benefit, which will provide tax-free monthly payment to families with children, pegged to a parent’s income, starting Oct. 1. The second is how quickly the NDP will continue its investment in affordable child care.

In turn, Social Development and Poverty Reduction Ministry Shane Simpson said child poverty numbers have come down in recent years, largely due to a benefit plan introduced by the federal Liberals in 2016.

Simpson said he is confident the benefit

will bring a major drop in poverty rates.

And he said his government continues to expand affordable child care in the province, but growth is hampered by needing to train more early childhood education teachers and getting enough physical spaces open.

The NDP’s reduction plan has also committed to incrementally boosting the minimum wage over the next two years and increasing welfare and disability rates. But Montani argued the government needs to be less cautious and speed up these changes, calling the current rates “unconscionable.”

The numbers are based on the after-tax low income measure - or 50 per cent of the region’s median household income.

Governments typically use a market basket measure but First Call said it’s a faulty measure.

“In the case of the current MBM calculation, many of the sub indicators, like the cost of housing, are unrealistically low and generate a gap with LIM results that are too great to be explained by reasonable statistical

variations,” First Call states in the report.

The low-income measure for the FFGRD was not provided by deadline.

But according to the 2016 census, the median after-tax income for a Prince George household was $67,399, making the low-income measure $33,699.50.

Also last week, the city’s select committee on poverty reduction held its third meeting since it was formed to develop a response to the NDP’s plan, dubbed TogetherBC. Made up of about a dozen members representing various social agencies as well as the school district and Northern Health, they focussed on increasing the stock of affordable housing.

Suggestions raised included continuing the city’s tax exemption program for multiple-family housing, providing incentives to encourage secondary suites and encouraging affordable housing in areas where seniors feel safe.

The committee has until June to report back to city council.

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UNBC photo

UNBC president on medical leave

Citizen staff University of Northern British Columbia

president Daniel Weeks is taking medical leave.

In an email sent to UNBC staff Jan. 29, Weeks said he is taking the step effective immediately and its length is unknown at this point.

“I am dealing with some matters that I have put on hold for many, many weeks, but on the advice of my physician, I should no longer delay dealing with them,” Weeks said.

Further details were not provided.

Geoff Payne, UNBC’s vice president, research and graduate programs, will serve as acting president, Weeks said.

Last week, UNBC professor Peter Jackson presented a notice of motion to UNBC’s senate calling for a non-confidence vote against Weeks. A steering committee to review the motion for inclusion in the Feb. 26 senate meeting.

Jackson’s motion comes after a threeweek strike by UNBC faculty in November.

The faculty association and UNBC administration have agreed to take the labour dispute to arbitration.

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Scientists look to better management to dampen wildfire effects Randy SHORE Vancouver Sun

If the catastrophic fire seasons of 2017 and 2018 are the new normal, it won’t matter what B.C. electrifies in its battle for carbon neutrality.

In each of those years, wildfires in this province unleashed almost 200 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases, or three times the amount of carbon dioxide from all human activities, according to Werner Kurz, a senior scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.

To reverse that trend, our forests will need a serious design overhaul.

A team of scientists from the United States and Canada is undertaking a four-year partnership to find ways to achieve emission reductions from wildfires through landscape management, fuel load reduction and the creation of a bio-economy that makes use of forest waste, the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions announced this week.

Kurz explains the situation: The average annual direct emissions from wildfires in B.C. during the 1990s was 6 Mt CO2e - that’s six million tonnes of greenhouse gases stated as CO2 equivalents. In the 2000s, forest fires released 16 Mt CO2e annually. In each of 2017 and 2018, that figure was closer to 197 Mt CO2e, or 33 times more than the average year in the ’90s.

“Houston, we have a problem,” said Kurz, who was a lead author of several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports on land use and forestry.

Human-caused CO2 emissions in B.C. are currently about 64.5 Mt CO2e annually, with a target of 38 Mt CO2e by 2030, according to the provincial government, which has launched a massive program of electrification called CleanBC to help get us there.

But rather than helping us achieve any sort of carbon neutrality, our forests are now working against us, through a combination of pine beetle-killed forests and super-intense fire seasons.

“In the ’90s our forests were a net carbon sink,” he said. “In the next decade, the 2000s, they were smaller sinks and in some cases sources. In the 2010s, forests have been a source of carbon nearly every year.”

Long-term trends toward higher temperatures, lower precipitation and the frequency of ignition events such as lightning strikes have us moving briskly in the wrong direction.

“We could wait and see if things get worse and maybe 2017 and 2018 will repeat themselves, or we could explore ways to do things differently to reduce the risk of wildfires, the area burned, and the severity of wildfires in terms of their emissions,” he said. “That’s what this collaboration is about.”

The wildfire and carbon project is a $1-million partnership between Canadian researchers and the USDA forest service to “de-escalate the devastating forest wildfires that are increasingly occurring due to climate change.”

Certain forest-management practices, from fire suppression to hurry-up reforestation, have contributed to the dire situation we find ourselves in today, said UBC forestry professor Lori Daniels, Kurz’s co-principal investigator.

“We are paying a huge cost in carbon today because we were so good at putting out fires in the past,” she said.

Combined with a policy-driven aversion to prescribed burning, B.C. is grappling with forests that are loaded with fuel fallen needles and dead branches - that lead to intense, destructive fires.

Dense forests may not even be particularly efficient at storing carbon.

“What happens if we thin out the forest and reduce the stress on those trees competing for a limiting resource like soil moisture?” asked Daniels.

“Will the trees left behind grow faster and sequester more carbon? There is lots of evidence that under some circumstances, that is the case.”

Reducing fuel loads and thinning the forest is a time-consuming and expensive task, though communities like Kelowna are doing just that. But taking fuel out of the forest will require a biomass economy, some way to make useful products or energy rather than simply burning it in piles.

“If it is going to be burned, we should do that at high efficiency and displace fossil fuel with a form of sustainable energy,” she said. “Lots of small communities are still reliant on fossil fuels, so these are linkages that we can make.”

When it comes to regenerating forests, our approach needs to be more nuanced than clear-cutting and replanting trees that are prized by logging companies.

Agricultural style monocultures may not be the way to healthy forests.

B.C. has been focused on growing back the same species of trees that were harvested as quickly as possible, she said.

Often that means that non-market broadleaf trees like alder or aspen are weeded out with herbicides to allow the conifers to thrive. That may be a mistake.

“We thought that we were accelerating through the natural stages of regeneration,” she said. “In truth, we are seeing research that shows those broadleaf trees play a really important role.”

Broadleaf species contribute to nutrient cycling by growing and shedding leaves.

They provide protection from growingseason frosts and shade in times of drought, both of which can improve the survival rate of conifer seedlings.

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LNG workforce set to soar

Arthur Williams Citizen staff The top bosses of Coastal GasLink and LNG Canada expect to have thousands more employees working on their respective projects by the end of this year.

Coastal GasLink president David Pfeiffer said 2020, 2021 and 2022 will be the major years for constructing the pipeline.

“We’ve got about 1,000 (people) working on the project now,” he said. “We’ll ramp up to about 2,500 this summer.”

LNG Canada CEO Peter Zebedee said his workforce will double.

“We just finished what we call our pioneering work, clearing the land. We ended the year, 2019, with just under 1,500 people on the site,” Zebedee said. “We expect to have 3,000 workers on site by the end of the year.”

The two industry leaders were in Prince George lastTuesday for the #TrueNorth Business Forum.

Coastal GasLink is building a 670-kilometre natural gas pipeline from northeast B.C. to Kitimat, to serve the LNG export terminal LNG Canada is building. The combined value of the project is estimated at $6.6 billion.

Pfeiffer and Zebedee started off addressing the elephant in the room: the ongoing blockade southwest of Houston by a group of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their

supporters. On Jan. 3, the Wet’suet’en hereditary chiefs and members of the Unist’ot’en camp issued an “eviction notice” to workers at camp 9A and the surrounding area, part of an ongoing conflict about the development.

From day one, Coastal GasLink realized the importance of getting social licence from the communities and First Nations along the pipeline route, Pfeiffer said.

“We held meetings with all 20 of the nations (along the route), both elected and hereditary,” Pfeiffer said. “In most of the nations, the elected and hereditary systems work together very well.”

Those meetings have resulted in cooperation agreements with 20 First Nations, including elected councils representing some of the Wet’suwet’en First Nations like the Skin Tyee First Nation.

“One third of our fieldwork was done by Indigenous people, Indigenous companies, in the north,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s just such a great story.”

Pfeiffer said the company is still hoping to resolve the dispute with the Wet’suwet’en peacefully, without enforcing a court injunction granted to them by the B.C. Supreme Court on Dec. 31.

“The reality is, I really want to emphasize, that adequate consultation has occured,” Zebeedee said.

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Citizen Photo by James Doyle David Pfeifer

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Haisla chief backs LNG development Arthur WILLIAMS Citizen staff Haisla Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith gave a passionate, off-the-cuff speech Jan. 30 in defence of LNG development at the BC Natural Resources Forum.

Rather than wear a suit and give her prepared speech, Smith said she chose to dress like her real self – wearing a sweater and yoga pants – and speak from the heart, instead of repeating the same speaking points she’s said dozens of times.

“I had a 20-page prepared speech. As I read it it the other night, I thought, ‘I can’t read this.’ The ‘managing poverty to managing prosperity...’ You guys have heard those speeches,” Smith said. “In reality, this is me.”

Smith said she and her council support the development of the LNG Canada natural gas export terminal in Kitimat and the 670-kilometre Coastal GasLink pipeline which would supply it, because it means economic opportunities for their people.

“Our nation’s goal is to be an independent, powerful and prosperous nation. We can’t get there without powerful, prosperous, independent people,” she said.

She said she and her twin sister grew up mostly in the care of their grandparents.

“My grandfather was a victim of the

residential school, but they made my twin sister’s life most memorable. I didn’t think we were poor. We ate traditional food every day. But I grew up poor.”

Her mother died in her early 40s of cancer, and Smith and her twin helped raise their nine-year-old sister.

“Poverty, been there. Suicide, been there,” she said. “I don’t want our people to continue living that life.”

Smith said she remembers being 11 or 12 years old, walking by the band office on her way to school in the Kitimaat Village, and thinking the only jobs she’d ever likely get were as a janitor or working as an assistant in the band office.

“Alcan or the band office, those were the two places I had a chance to work,” she said. “I’m going to get pregnant early, be on social assistance. I’m going to be a burden on society. I’m supposed to be stupid, right? I came out of that school believing that.”

She went to a local community college but dropped out after a year. The self-fulfilling prophecy came true when she got a job working as an assistant to the elected chief at the band office.

It was working for former Haisla chief councillor Ellis Ross, now the B.C. Liberal MLA for Skeena, that helped inspire her that she could do more.

“The reason he did what he did was because of people like me,” she said.

Projects like LNG Canada’s gas terminal are giving her people a chance to escape poverty and have hope for the future, she said.

“I’ve seen the impacts firsthand. I’ve felt the these impacts firsthand,” Smith said.

“The focus for us is the long-term careers.”

Her 17-year-old daughter has a twoyear-old son, and will face challenges as she considers going into post-secondary education, Smith said.

“I asked her, ‘Do you have hope?’ She said, ‘Yeah, because with what’s going on in the nation, you can do anything. You can be anything. And Xavier will be taken care of all his life,’” Smith said. “Hearing my 17-year-old daughter say that, (I know) our nation isn’t doing the wrong thing. I support projects, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

The project is also generating benefits at the First Nation governance level, she added, providing revenue to support projects.

“For the first time ever, we’re funding culture and language programs. We’re also expanding existing programs. This independence is what we want,” she said.

“This is what we need more of in our community. We need to heal our people.

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No other government... has been able to heal our people the way they need it.”

Smith said she is also mindful that the project isn’t just an opportunity for them, but for their neighbours and other First Nations in the region.

“At every First Nations table I sit at, or to the other First Nations leaders in the room... I want to see your people come to Kitimat,” she said. “There is enough opportunity, we’re not going to be be able to fill it all. That opportunity is LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink.”

When asked about the blockade by some Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their supporters impeding work on the Coastal GasLink pipeline, Smith said she is sympathetic to the Wet’suwet’en people and the difficult political divide in their community. She’s experienced similar conflicts in her own First Nation.

“These are people’s lives. Our community experienced that, too. There is a political divide, and you have families that don’t talk to each other. It is the hardest thing to go through...” she said. “What is happening in the territory of the Wet’suwet’en can only be resolved by the Wet’suwet’en. (But) they have the power – forget the titles, the people have the power to decide who leads them.”

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Success stories defy industry myths Nelson BENNETT Glacier Media When it comes to international capital markets and mineral exploration, British Columbia has a perception problem - that the province is a risky place to invest because 110 per cent of its land base is claimed by First Nations.

That’s a perception Corinne McKay, secretary-treasurer of Nisga’a Lisims Government, said she encountered when she attended a mining symposium in London in 2018.

Responding to a question about unsettled land claims in B.C., McKay pointed out that when the Nisga’a signed a treaty nearly 20 years ago, her nation got seven per cent of its claimed territory as title land, not 100 per cent.

But apart from the unsettled land question, international investors also read the newspapers, which have been filled with headlines about First Nations blockading pipelines in B.C. They seldom read about all the First Nations in B.C. who are eagerly seeking equity positions in those very pipelines or partnering with mining companies to bring new mines into production.

B.C.’s perception problem is one the BC Regional Mining Alliance (BCRMA) - which includes the Nisga’a and Tahltan - has been trying to counter.

There are pockets of B.C. where resource development may still founder due to opposition from First Nations. But the Golden Triangle, which hugs the Alaska border in northwest B.C., isn’t one of them, as delegates attending last week’s

Association for Mineral Exploration (AME) Roundup conference heard.

The BCRMA is a partnership between the B.C. government, the Nisga’a and Tahltan and five mining companies with properties being developed in the Golden Triangle.

The message they are trying to spread is that, when it comes to mining, B.C. is open for business and it’s a sector that enjoys the support of First Nations - at least in northwestern B.C. “We know that it’s a growth industry for many of our people, and we know that there’s potential and we’d like to capitalize on that,” McKay said. “There’s no dignity in unemployment, so if there’s an opportunity to provide capacity for training and employment, our people are there.”

The region is geologically blessed with gold, silver and copper, has power from the Northwest Transmission Line and is home to supportive First Nations.

The Tahltan have had a particularly good relationship with mining and have spent considerable resources and energy on capacity building and skills training. The result, according to Tahltan elder Jerry Asp, is full employment for his people.

Asp was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame for his efforts to bring his people into the mining sector.

“We had 98 per cent unemployment in the winter and 65 per cent unemployment in the summer in our nation,” Asp said. “And we took it to zero.”

Citing a presentation given by Tahltan Central Government President Chad Day, Asp said 400 Tahltan people are employed in the mining sector - 300 in

operating mines like Red Chris and 100 in exploration.

“We’re earning somewhere in the neighbourhood of $30 million annually in wages to the Tahltan,” Asp said.

There are a dozen prospective new mines in the Golden Triangle at various stages of development, but to date, only two have gone into operation since the $746 million Northwest Transmission Line was completed in 2014 - Red Chris copper and Brucejack gold mine.

The next new mine to be built in the region may be the Premier-DilworthRed Mountain project. Last year, Ascot Resources (TSX:AOT), which owned the Premier brownfield project, acquired the greenfield Red Mountain project when it bought out IDM Mining.

“We have a hub and a spoke concept,” said Kristina Howe, Ascot’s vice-president of investor relations. “We have a central mill and we’ve got four different deposits. Red Mountain would be one of the deposits that would feed that mill.”

The project is in the southern end of the Golden Triangle in Nisga’a traditional territory. Last year, the company signed a benefits agreement with the Nisga’a that includes cash payments and training and employment for Nisga’a people.

But new mines like Ascot’s project have been a lot slower in coming than the provincial government had hoped. Peter Robb, assistant deputy minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources, said the construction of the Northwest Transmission Line was expected to kick-start a whole new generation of mines in the northwest.

“It hasn’t had the impact we wanted yet,” Robb said. “We thought mines would be flying off the shelf and really come together quite quickly.”

Mines in the Golden Triangle are getting permitted but not getting built. A big part of the problem is that mining and exploration simply isn’t attracting the risk capital that it once did.

And it’s not just a B.C. problem, although the perception that B.C. is a risky place to try to build a mine doesn’t help.

There has been a flight of investor capital from the junior mining sector, especially among the “generalist” investor, Matt Dugaro, executive director of investment banking for CIBC, said at a panel discussion on finance at last week’s AME conference.

At the beginning of the decade, about $8 billion in equity financing went into the junior mining sector, said Joe Mazumdar, an analyst with Exploration Insights; at the end of the decade it was down to $2.1 billion.

About half the money going into exploration and development projects is coming from private placements, Dugaro said, with the rest coming from other financing sources like streaming.

“We need to see the generalist investor come back to the sector,” he said.

As for international investors and mining majors, the mining alliance wants to make it clear: they can get mines built in B.C. “You have to be able to figure out Indigenous relations and you have to be able to figure out water quality,” Robb said.

“If you can figure out those two things in British Columbia, you can build a mine.”

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