Opinion: Canada’s next corridors will rise or fall on Indigenous leadership

Canada’s history can be traced along its corridors. The rail lines that stitched the country together, the pipelines that carried oil to distant markets, the highways and transmission towers that reshaped the land — all were called “nation-building.”

But for Indigenous peoples, those same projects told another story — corridors of dispossession, carved through their territories without consent.

Now, a new wave of corridors is on the horizon. Arctic ports and shipping routes. Roads and power lines to unlock critical minerals, energy pipelines and LNG facilities.

The question before us is whether these new corridors will echo the failures of the past or chart a new path — one that is Indigenous-led. The courts have already made clear that projects cannot proceed without Indigenous consult