Indigenous Reconciliation is an Asset for Canada’s Economic Security

In 2025, a tanker left Kitimat, British Columbia, carrying Canada’s first-ever cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) bound for Asia as an opening move in Ottawa’s plan to double what Canada sells outside the United States within a decade. The move also represented progress in Canada’s reputation, in what Business Council of Canada President, Trevor Kennedy, characterized as a “drive-by shooting,” rather than as the Indo-Pacific Strategy’s “reliable supplier” objective.

What received less notice is that the cargo came from a facility on Haisla Nation territory, near to the Haisla Nation majority-owned Cedar LNG. The Haisla Nation made history as the first majority-owned LNG facility in the world. Canada’s export success in the Asia-Pacific does not merely coexist with Indigenous partnership, it depends on it, by the land on which it stands and exporting facilities alike.

Ottawa should move beyond partnering with individual Indigenous businesses to nation-building exercises. It should embed Indigenous advisory councils, like those at the Major Projects Office, across every geographic team at Global Affairs Canada (GAC), informing trade agreements, economic partnerships and security engagements alike. However, the sequence matters as much as the structure of this fundamental foreign policy change.

Before any council is set up, Ottawa must hold genuine, country-wide engagement with First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders to co-design the mandate, membership and authority of these bodies. That authority needs to mean more than a seat at the table after a decision is drafted: it should give councils a formal, early checkpoint capable of pausing or redirecting a position before it reaches negotiating partners, not just a chance to react to one already set. The institutions follow from co-development, guided by principles surfaced through the process of engagement, such as cognitive empathy in conflict resolution, mutual respect among equal-footed partners and decision-making oriented toward intergenerational stewardship.

Indigenous Commitments Intertwine with Canada’s Economic Security: The Evidence of Need

Why is this necessary? Canada’s policymaking structure has not caught up with its commitments to its own rule-making order. The commitments exist already in GAC’s mandate, including the action plan for implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) through co-developed policies, GAC’s internal Action Plan on Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples promising dialogue on international engagement, and the Indigenous Peoples Economic and Trade Cooperation Arrangement (IPETCA) promoting Indigenous-owned businesses in trade. Yet in practice, consultation arrives after decisions are made, confined to sectors where Indigenous economic interests are established. Communities and leaders are asked to react, not to shape.

The gap goes further as a hard economic and security problem, slowing Canada’s success in dealmaking across Asia. Accounts of trade deals and strategic partnerships are faced with consistent calls for people-to-people ties, and for Canada to make more of an effort to maximize staying power in its trade diversification efforts. Those calls are usually made in general terms, pointing to education exchange, diaspora ties and civil society links rather than to Indigenous Peoples specifically. But in Canada, one of the most concrete and demonstrable forms that staying power can take runs through Indigenous territory, because so much of what partners are really asking Canada to prove, durability, local buy-in, follow-through, is exactly what Indigenous consent and partnership decide. Most major projects in the national priority list sit on or adjacent to Indigenous lands, which eventually led to a doubling of Ottawa’s Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program to $10 billion to finance Indigenous equity ownership.

According to Fasken, there are almost 200 energy and related infrastructure projects across Canada that are partially or wholly owned by Indigenous communities. The Haisla First Nation borrowed $1.4 billion through the First Nations Finance Authority to own Cedar LNG, with nearly 93 percent of members voting in favour. Projects without consent stall in courtrooms and blockades, and every stalled project runs parallel to greater calls for Canadian energy export to Asia. Indigenous partnership is not adjacent to Canada’s export credibility, it is fundamental to avoid litigation roadblocks.

Multi-Sector Foreign Policy Leadership and the Next Technological Revolution: The Evidence of Ability

The success of partnership with Indigenous Peoples in foreign policy is best represented by a like-minded state in the Indo-Pacific. New Zealand (NZ) revealed the benefits of what it does for diplomacy amidst economic and political uncertainty. Between 2020 and 2023, then-foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta advanced a “Māori foreign policy” grounded in one form of Indigenous Ways of Knowing, such as hospitality, connectedness, collaboration and intergenerational stewardship in building durable strategic partnerships. In that time, NZ resolved non-tariff barriers worth $423 million in a single term, maintained a “mature” relationship with China during potential economic coercion, while rebuilding its standing among Pacific Island nations that long viewed NZ as another colonial power.

The success of a “Maori foreign policy” depended on the ministerial authority of Mahuta as Minister of Foreign Affairs, rather than flowing from the advice of an advisory body. That flow of power allowed key Indigenous perspectives to flow into decision-making, into staffing strategies and the nature of policy analysis in New Zealand. A council structure throughout Global Affairs Canada would make incremental steps towards early, informed and prior consent to major decisions affecting First Nations, Metis and most indicatively, Inuit. 

Canada’s own Arctic strategy reveals what Indigenous foreign policy could grow meaningfully into, engaging directly with Inuit communities beyond early and engaged consultation. When the Minister of National Defence joined the Inuit-Crown Partnership Committee in 2022, Arctic defence collaboration moved from ad hoc consultation to a standing structure with consequential results. Ottawa committed to “uphold the role of Arctic and northern Indigenous Peoples as active partners in the conduct of international relations in the Arctic,” in its Arctic Foreign Policy to centre Northern Indigenous communities in the shaping of these policies. With the promise of a youth internship program to help deliver Canada’s interests in the North, and inclusion of Indigenous voices at international organizations like the Arctic Council or the United Nations, Canada holds promises to co-develop international policy with Indigenous Peoples, but these have yet to materialize.

The next test is already arriving with Canada’s National Quantum Strategy making quantum sensing a core mission, and the government intention to deploy these technologies to monitor Arctic territory as part of its defence modernization. Add in arguably, the most sensitive dual-use technology Canada has ever fielded will operate on and over the homelands of Inuit, Northern First Nations, and Métis communities, raising questions about data governance and who will benefit from the jobs that follow. An Indigenous-led mechanism will need to look different here than it did at Cedar LNG: nobody is offering equity in a radar system. But the underlying principle carries over regardless of sector, that the people whose territory hosts a capability should help set its terms and share in what it produces, whether that is dividends or data. 

Engaging before deployment, and co-developing policy could follow the Haisla and Māori models, linking security capability, export credibility and Indigenous community prosperity to reinforce each other. With litigation already a national debate in the context of nation-building, the risk of engaging Indigenous Peoples as an afterthought will set Canada behind.

Launching Advisory Councils for Canada’s Economic Leadership

The tanker that left Kitimat proved Canada can be a reliable partner when First Nations lead. The frameworks are signed, the loan guarantees are funded, and the proof points now stretch from the South Pacific to a growing geopolitical flashpoint in the North. The deliberate choice to build the machinery of engagement before the next project, agreement, or technology arrives, is missing. Despite successes in efforts clearly centring Indigenous Peoples, Canada must still center Indigenous Peoples in Canada’s greater global engagement. Elevating the Indigenous voice in foreign policy would only bolster the benefit of converting domestic legitimacy into international staying power. Ottawa needs to start the conversation across the country with Indigenous leaders so that the exception on Haisla territory becomes the way Canada does business with Asia, and couches Canada’s trade diversification goals in secure decision-making.