Indigenous youth from Attawapiskat First Nation spent the week of Sept. 17 travelling through Ottawa, Toronto, Kitchener and London, Ont., urging Canadians to oppose Prime Minister Mark Carney’s fast-tracked resource development agenda, timed to coincide with a federal investment summit courting foreign capital, according to a Canadian Press report published Sept. 17.
Jeronimo Kataquapit and his cousin Ramon travelled by canoe along the James Bay coast before joining the tour, dubbed Together for Nature and organized by Ontario Nature and Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence. “I didn’t want to wait around for our elected leaders to take action. We needed to make our presence known on the river,” Jeronimo Kataquapit said, according to the Canadian Press. He said the mineral-rich Ring of Fire region their community is fighting to protect gets treated “as if it’s a statistic, as if it’s a number, as if it’s money to be made,” when it is, in fact, people’s homes.
The tour ran while Carney hosted hundreds of executives at a two-day investment summit in Toronto on Sept. 15 and 16, part of a push to reposition Canada as open for business amid U.S. tariff pressure. Katisha Paul, founder of NEPENEK and a women’s representative with the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, called the summit an “extraction pitch” and questioned whose interests are really being served when, as she put it, a “banker sitting in front of a trillion dollars” gets to decide the national interest. Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Na’Moks went further, accusing Ottawa of “blackmailing the public” with warnings that the economy will suffer without faster approvals.
What wire coverage of the tour leaves out is how far the underlying fight now goes back. The legislation youth are protesting, Bill C-5’s Building Canada Act, cleared the Senate and became law in June 2025, more than a year ago, giving cabinet power to fast-track approvals for projects it deems in the national interest, according to CBC News. Critics, including the Assembly of First Nations, warned at the time it would let Ottawa override the duty to consult and the standard of free, prior and informed consent that Canada committed to under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a standard meant to give Indigenous communities real decision-making power over what happens on their land, not just a seat at a briefing.
Ottawa’s answer to that criticism was an Indigenous Advisory Council for the new Major Projects Office, announced in September 2025 with 11 members serving two-year terms. Carney said at the time it would “ensure that projects move forward in true partnership with Indigenous peoples.” But Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Kyra Wilson said no First Nations leader from her province was even considered, calling the process exclusionary, and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs said the office amounts to Ottawa “deliberately sidestepping its duty to consult,” according to APTN News. A year later, with the Major Projects Office headquartered in Calgary under former Trans Mountain CEO Dawn Farrell, the youth tour suggests that promised partnership still has not landed for the communities closest to projects like the Ring of Fire.
The stakes extend beyond mining. Carney’s government is also weighing private investment in Canada’s four largest airports, another file the tour raised in Kitchener and London as evidence of a broader shift toward investor-driven decision-making. No final project list has been approved under the Building Canada Act’s fast-track process, so the coming months, as Ottawa moves from summit pledges to specific approvals, will show whether the advisory council can do more than absorb criticism while decisions proceed on the timeline investors were promised in Toronto.
Via BNN Bloomberg / The Canadian Press. Read the original report here.
