Manitoba native group asks Hugo Chavez for help fighting pipelines

Ronald Nurwisah, April 18, 2008, Financial Post -- After praising Hugo Chavez for its fight with “Big Oil” in Venezuela, a First Nations group in Manitoba is asking the leftist leader for a $1-million donation or loan to help it fight the government of Canada over two large oil pipelines that would pass through its lands.

In a letter mailed this week to Mr. Chavez, the Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation said the two pipelines, Enbridge Inc.’s Alberta Clipper and TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone, will carrying 1.2-million barrels of oil extracted from Alberta’s oilsands to American consumers over its lands, without the community getting paid for rights of way.

“At US$107 a barrel oil, Canada can afford to share with the original owners of the resource wealth,” the band tells Mr. Chavez, whom it describes as “a beacon of hope for poor and oppressed people everywhere.”

The group says it needs the money to fight a lawsuit against the federal government, Enbridge, TransCanada and the National Energy Board, after the federal government refused to enter into negotiations on the dispute.

In an interview, Chief Terrance Nelson said everyone but indigenous people seems to be collecting money for the oilsands’ extraction or transportation – farmers, municipalities, provinces, the federal government and industry.

“The Crown, which is the party to the treaties, should be giving up some of the amount they get because that is what the courts have said,” he said.

The band targeted Mr. Chavez for the foreign aid request because of the support he showed to American natives by selling them $1-billion in cheap heating oil from Venezuela in the last three years, he said.