Jeune Street

St Antony's College, Oxford

On Wednesday night, Lita and I attended a presentation by Cosanna Preston, a friend of ours, on the Lubicon indigenous people in Alberta and their struggles amidst oil exploitation on their land. While on its surface the story was one of poverty and deprivation in an otherwise very wealthy country, it was also about the failure of public policy to find intermediate solutions to vexing social problems.

The problem

The problem, as I understood it, was this: there are less than 500 Lubicon living on a large piece of land that has produced about $14 billion of oil. There is no record of these people signing a treaty with the Canadian government over their land rights (this was the typical form of legal expropriation used by early settlers and government). The Lubicon assert their rights to the land for ancestral reasons, and the government is stalling in negotiations because resolving the land rights question would compromise its negotiating position with oil companies. The failure to resolve the land rights question means that the Lubicon are excluded from decision-making around drilling and environmental sustainability in the area. Many live in poverty with poor infrastructure - worse, it appears than other indigenous communities in Canada.

The need for pragmatism

This whole issue speaks to irrationality of trying to reach perfect solutions, especially when competing historical claims are involved. Compromise is necessary. The intermediate ground can be more feasible and, at the end of the day, what both parties need. Just look at Israel: the issue is about more than the many historical maps that are contested. It's about two peoples that need an imperfect solution that allows them to get on with their lives. So it is with the Lubicon.

The land issue in Canada is complex, and I'm far from qualified to tackle it. But I can't help but think that in the absence of a legal resolution of land rights, public policy can step in with an intermediate solution for the Lubicon. The majority of their claims are fairly basic: education, infrastructure (water, sanitation, roads), environmental regulations for oil companies, and a say about where new pipelines go (eg. not across their water sources). These are not big claims, and they could be addressed with public policy while the land claims issue is still in negotiation.

Justice doesn't always mean crafting perfect agreement. Sometimes it involves a healthy dose of pragmatism.