Supreme Court of Canada decisions have defined a general framework for the "duty to consult" Aboriginal peoples and accommodate their concerns over natural resource development, but anticipate the details of that framework will be expanded upon in the future. Aboriginal Consultation, Environmental Assessment, and Regulatory Review in Canada offers a paradigm that advances that discussion. It proposes an integrated and robust planning model for natural resource extraction allowing Aboriginal peoples, industry, governments, tribunals, and the Courts to all make contributions to reconciliation in the context of sustainable development and environmental protection. Kirk Lambrecht surveys the law of actual and asserted Aboriginal rights and historical and modern Treaty rights in Canada and discusses the national and international purposes of environmental assessment and regulatory review. He appraises the fundamental principles of Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence defining aboriginal consultation and accommodation as a constitutional imperative and uses case studies involving the National Energy Board to demonstrate how integrated process has evolved over time. Finally he offers general conclusions on the practical utility, and outstanding challenges, involving an integrated planning paradigm.

In this in-depth analysis of First Nations opposition to the oil sands industry, James Heydon offers detailed empirical insight into Canadian oil sands regulation. The environmental consequences of the oil sands industry have been thoroughly explored by scholars from a variety of disciplines. However, less well understood is how and why the provincial energy regulator has repeatedly sanctioned such a harmful pattern of production for almost two decades. This research monograph addresses that shortcoming. Drawing from interviews with government, industry, and First Nation personnel, along with an analysis of almost 20 years of policy, strategy, and regulatory approval documents, Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm offers detailed empirical insight into Canadian oil sands regulation. Providing a thorough account of the ways in which the regulatory process has prioritised economic interests over the land-based cultural interests of First Nations, it addresses a gap in the literature by explaining how environmental harm has been systematically produced over time by a regulatory process tasked with the pursuit of ‘sustainable development’. With an approach emphasizing the importance of understanding how and why the regulatory process has been able to circumvent various protections for the entire duration in which the contemporary oil sands industry has existed, this work complements existing literature and provides a platform from which future investigations into environmental harm may be conducted. It is essential reading for those with an interest in green criminology, environmental harm, indigenous rights, and regulatory controls relating to fossil fuel production.

Examines critical links between local content requirements and the application of sustainable development treaties in global energy markets.

Since the release of The Duty to Consult (Purich, 2009), there have been many important developments on the duty to consult, including three major Supreme Court of Canada decisions. Governments, Aboriginal communities, and industry stakeholders have engaged with the duty to consult in new and probably unexpected ways, developing policy statements or practices that build upon the duty, but often using it only as a starting point for different discussions. Evolving international legal norms have also come into practice that may have future bearing. Newman offers clarification and approaches to understanding the developing case law at a deeper and more principled level, and suggests possible future directions for the duty to consult in Canadian Aboriginal law.

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.