Wells, Pipelines and Broken Promises

Join us from February 6 until March 13, 2005

Every time a new oil or gas well or pipeline is approved for development in Lubicon Traditional Territory, you will receive an e-mail message from OLS informing you that yet another development has been authorized to steal Lubicon resources. They add up – last January twenty-two new developments were approved, last February thirty new developments were approved, and in March eighteen new developments were approved.

The email will include a draft letter you can cut and paste into a new message or letter to send to the Minister of Indian Affairs, with copies to your Member of Parliament and the Alberta Minister of Native Affairs. Addresses of the two Ministers will be provided. You can find out the address of your Member of Parliament by going here. The draft letter will note that yet another development has been authorized on Lubicon Territory prior to Lubicon land rights being resolved and will ask that the Minister meet his Constitutional responsibility to negotiate the settlement of aboriginal land rights with the Lubicon people.

If enough people participate, the responsible officials will be receiving thousands of emails or letters during the campaign, which will encourage them to take action on this issue at last. The volume and frequency of e-mails coming in could be significant.

Please consider participating in this important new initiative. With your help we hope to demonstrate that a significant number of Canadians and other supporters around the world are paying close attention to how the Martin government handles this critical issue.

You can also help increase the impact by passing this message along to all of your friends and associates and encouraging them to participate in the campaign.

More about this campaign

The campaign will start on February 6, 2005. February 6 will be the 19th anniversary of the delivery of the Fulton report. E. Davie Fulton was the former federal Justice Minister who was appointed by the federal government to investigate the Lubicon situation and make recommendations for settlement. His report, which made reasonable recommendations to resolve the dispute, was shelved and ignored. Fulton was dismissed. Now almost 20 years have passed since he made recommendations for settlement and a settlement is still outstanding.

The campaign will continue until March 12, which is the 12th anniversary of the release of the Lubicon Settlement Commission of Review's report. The Lubicon Settlement Commission was an independent and non-partisan tribunal made up of professors, business people, religious leaders, lawyers, labour leaders and environmentalists who, like Fulton, investigated all sides of the Lubicon dispute and made a series of recommendations for settlement – including a recommendation that all royalties from oil and gas development be held in trust until settlement and "further, that there be no additional permits or leases granted on traditional Lubicon lands without Lubicon approval."

It was in response to the Lubicon Settlement Commission's report, which was presented by the Toronto Friends of the Lubicon to a large number of MPs in Ottawa as part of a lobby campaign, that then-Liberal Leader Jean Chretien made the infamous promise to settle Lubicon land rights once he was Prime Minister – a promise he never upheld.

One of the other key recommendations of both Fulton and the Settlement Commission was that financial compensation be paid to the Lubicon people. The Settlement Commission recommended compensation in the range of $50 million (in 1992 dollars) from each level of government – now worth even more in current dollars. This is a key outstanding issue in land rights negotiations. In light of the enormous amount of resources being taken from Lubicon Traditional Territory over the past 25 years, federal negotiators must be given a mandate to negotiate financial compensation as part of a Lubicon settlement.