Ottawa is offering Indigenous communities along the Trans Mountain pipeline route a combined 15 per cent equity stake, and two of the country’s most prominent Indigenous energy advocates say the number falls well short of what economic reconciliation should look like.
The offer, detailed in letters the Department of Finance sent under Minister François-Philippe Champagne on Sept. 22, 2026, covers 129 First Nations whose territory the pipeline crosses between Alberta and the Vancouver area, according to CBC News. Participating communities would receive an equal share of the 15 per cent stake through a low-cost government loan, plus a $2.5-million payment each for historical lost revenue and up to $100,000 through March 2028 to cover consultation costs such as travel and hiring independent advisers, Narcity reported. Ottawa plans in-person sessions in Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops and Edmonton in late October to walk through the details before individual stake sizes are finalized.
Stephen Buffalo, president of the Alberta Indian Resource Council, called the offer “a feeble attempt at economic reconciliation” and said the government should be putting at least 50 per cent on the table, according to Bloomberg News. Steve Mason, executive director of Project Reconciliation, said First Nations “should own a material piece” and set a floor of 30 per cent. Not every leader was as critical: Dale Swampy of the National Coalition of Chiefs called 15 per cent “a great offer” and a starting point that could still give communities a say over environmental oversight and hiring.
The sharpest edge of that dispute is easy to miss without the file’s history. Mason’s group, Project Reconciliation, spent years pushing to buy a much larger piece of Trans Mountain, at one point floating the idea of up to 100 per cent Indigenous ownership of the entire pipeline, as part of a federal process launched in 2020 to sell equity stakes to Indigenous-led buyers, the Globe and Mail has reported. That process stalled as construction costs on the pipeline’s expansion ballooned to roughly $34.2 billion, and at least one of the original bidding groups, Nesika Services, quietly wound down. Six years after Ottawa first floated selling a stake to Indigenous communities, the number on the table has gone from a bidder’s ambition of full ownership to a government-set offer of 15 per cent, split among all 129 communities rather than sold to one buyer.
The financing structure is also new. Rather than a straight sale, Ottawa is using a loan-based model that echoes the federal government’s $5-billion Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, launched in February 2025, which lets Indigenous groups borrow against a project’s future revenue while Ottawa backstops the debt. That approach is meant to solve the problem that sank earlier Indigenous bids for major resource projects: communities often could not raise enough capital upfront to compete for an outright purchase.
Ottawa bought Trans Mountain from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion in 2018 after the company balked at continued delays and legal challenges, several of them brought by First Nations objecting to inadequate consultation. The federally owned pipeline’s expansion, which twinned the line to nearly triple its capacity, was completed in 2024 at more than seven times its original budget.
Whether the 15 per cent figure moves before Ottawa’s late-October meetings will be the real test of how seriously the government is treating the reconciliation promise it has repeated since buying the pipeline seven years ago.
Via CBC News, Bloomberg News, Narcity and the Globe and Mail. Original report: CBC News, “Feds open up Trans Mountain equity stake to Indigenous groups on pipeline’s path”
