Yes. Thank you very much.
[Witness speaks in Tsimshian]
It's a real pleasure to be here today. I'm both a failed commercial fisherman and a recovering lawyer, so the time you've allotted to me doesn't seem like very much.
I'm here to tell you what took us five years to accomplish. In five years, we realized that, in dealing with first nations, the most important thing was the environment, stupid. In that context, first nations people, particularly the 30-plus communities that have supported our project, have told us that they do not like outsiders, particularly those they view as trust-fund babies coming into the traditional territories they've governed and looked after for over 10,000 years and dictating government policy in their territory.
They told us this over and over again, in the thousands of meetings we had with them over five years, in relation to establishing an oil pipeline, which originally was intended to go from Fort McMurray to Prince Rupert. Once we engaged the producers, the route was changed from Bruderheim, not to Prince Rupert but to Grassy Point near Lax Kw'alaams, John's community. They told us very clearly that the most important thing was the environment, and that they need the environment to be addressed.
We took two or three years, and we hired international experts from Norway and various places, and came to the decision that Alaska pretty much had the state-of-the-art environmental model in the world. We came back to the first nations and we had a bunch of community meetings with them over and over again, and when they were satisfied that we had met the standard that they felt would protect the environment, they agreed to sign agreements in principle to proceed with such a project.
At our first meeting to engage in this project, we set up a chiefs council that represented all of the chiefs from Alberta all the way out to the B.C. coast. They have had a position with a lot of power and control over the environmental aspects and over the project in general, so it was a fairly high hurdle that we sought to meet. They were so satisfied with the environmental model we put forward that they voluntarily voted at their first meeting to support an energy corridor.
This is a very, very difficult thing to do, given that most projects.... I understand that the Kinder Morgan project has something like 30 first nations supporting it, out of 120. We have just about 100%.
What I would like to do at this point is to let the hereditary chief who represents the chiefs from B.C. speak on behalf of them, and then let Chief Isaac speak on behalf of the chiefs from Alberta who are involved in the project, please.