The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Current unpredictability in world oil markets aside, Canada’s economic prosperity lies in the development of its natural resources. What’s equally evident is that aboriginal communities are going to demand, and receive, a greater share of that wealth.

It wasn’t long ago that the notion of apportioning a percentage of resource revenue to First Nations was considered lunacy. But a series of court decisions over the past couple of decades has imposed a change of thinking on the country’s political class. Consequently, governments have slowly begun coming around to the idea there might be more to be gained by making aboriginal groups legitimate economic partners in resource development than by continuing to shut them out of the action.

But the approaches taken by provincial entities and territorial governments have been ad hoc, creating a patchwork of revenue-sharing arrangements. Some governments, such as British Columbia, have aggressively pursued these agreements, while Saskatchewan and Alberta remain holdouts.

In a well-reasoned paper being released Friday by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, author Ken Coates argues that it’s time for the country to more fully embrace resource revenue pacts as a means of improving the lives of First Nations people and creating a more stable resource development environment.

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The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.

This past December, the Yukon Supreme Court handed down an important aboriginal law ruling that has implications for future mining operations in the Yukon. In The First Nation of Nacho Nyak Dun v. Yukon (Government of), 2014 YKSC 69, Yukon Supreme Court Justice Ron Veale held that the Yukon government’s modifications to the Peel land use plan did not respect the land use planning process set out in the final agreements (modern treaties) with the Na-Cho Nyak Dun, Tr’ondek Hwech’in and Vuntut Gwichin First Nations, and struck down the land use plan as a result.

The case marks the first time that a court has been asked to consider the meaning of land use planning provisions contained in the Umbrella Final Agreement between Canada, Yukon and Yukon First Nations, which forms part of 11 final agreements across Yukon. Among other things, the final agreements provide First Nations with the right to participate in land and resource management decision-making for Crown lands, including land use planning processes, in exchange for the release of claims to aboriginal rights or title to those lands.

While the decision deals specifically with the Peel watershed in northeast Yukon, the case will have direct implications for land use planning throughout the Yukon, and could have indirect impacts on consultative requirements under modern treaties for other governmental land and resource use decision making.

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