Tausi Insider

A totem pole is pictured outside the Kinder Morgan Burnaby Terminal and Tank Farm in Burnaby, B.C., on June 20, 2019. JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images Robert Merasty is the executive director of the Indigenous Resource Network and former chief of Flying Dust First Nation. With the continuing global energy crisis, Canada is looking at ways to fast-track resource development infrastructure. For example, the federal government’s recent fiscal update provided $1.28-billion to improve its response time in assessing major projects. While this could help Ottawa in its regulatory approval process, there’s still a piece missing: The industry needs more support from Indigenous communities if it wants to move projects along quicker. The federal government has said multiple times that its duty to consult with Indigenous communities affected by mega-projects does not equal to their having a veto. But time and again, Indigenous opposition has been a major force in stopping or delaying energy infra...

Salmo, a small mountain village in interior B.C., has seen average property values increase by 60 per cent from $199,000 before the start of the pandemic to $319,000 in July 2021, upending years of a relatively flat market Salmaan Farooqui/Tausi Insider For years, Salmo, B.C., was the kind of place travellers would drive by without noticing. It isn’t even on the main highway tourists use in the province. Nestled at the bottom of the Kootenay Pass, one of Canada’s highest mountain pass highways open year-round, the southern B.C. village of roughly 1,000 people was mostly a place to fill up with gas after a hair-raising drive. With an out-of-the-way location that is roughly eight hours of mountain driving from Calgary or Vancouver, property has always been cheap. But like a gentrifying neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, the sense that things are changing is palpable. More young families with strollers can be seen walking through the village centre. A craft brewery opened in 2020 that w...

Steve Pomerleau, Taylor Gorick, Teri Gorick and Catie Hildenbrand stand outside of Project Hope, the community food pantry Taylor and her husband Steve started. Handout The organizers: Taylor Gorick and Steve Pomerleau The pitch: Launching Project Hope The reason: To provide food to those in need A couple of years ago, Taylor Gorick and her husband, Steve Pomerleau, were trying to think of a way to help people in their community when they came up with the idea of donating food packages to homeless people in Windsor, Ont. With the help of family and friends, they delivered 100 boxes. “It felt really good, but also something didn’t seem right,” Ms. Gorick recalled from the family’s home in Harrow, which is about 40 minutes south of Windsor. “It kind of felt like we were just giving them a Band-Aid solution.” She’d seen community pantries where someone sets up a fridge on a sidewalk and people donate what they can or take what they need. She liked the idea and turned it into Project ...

A Quebec Innu community is suing Hydro-Quebec for $2.2-billion, claiming the Churchill Falls hydroelectric station has destroyed a significant part of their traditional territory. The lawsuit filed Friday in Quebec Superior Court by the Innu of Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam claims the megaproject’s reservoirs and more than 1,000 kilometres of transmission lines “flooded and destroyed” part of their traditional territory and disrupted the community’s traditional activities. The band council says construction of the 5,428-megawatt station in Labrador and its transmission facilities in the 1960s and early 1970swas done without the consent of the community near Sept-Iles, Que. A 1969 agreement that allows Hydro-Quebec to purchase the majority of the electricity generated at the station and reap most of the profits ends in 2041. The community is asking the court to recognize its Aboriginal title to the affected territory and wants an injunction to prohibit the Crown corporation from making any n...