MLI Senior Fellow Ken Coates and author Dwight Newman spoke to The Canadian Press for a story examining the role of the ‘duty to consult’ in the federal government’s decision earlier this week to conditionally approve the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Coates told CP that court challenges to the project will likely produce new case law on the duty to consult, which first arose about a decade ago as a result of a decision from the Supreme Court.
“This is such a major scale and there’s so much at stake that you’re almost certainly going to get not just litigation, but precedent-setting determinations coming out”, Coates said.
Newman, the author of a recently released paper on the subject, explained that the decision now forces the federal government to consult with Aboriginals where before the law was less clear.
