BC First Nation mulling billion-dollar LNG deal has history of savvy moves – The Globe and Mail
May. 04 2015
Lax Kw’alaams First Nation is now deciding on a billion-dollar LNG deal announced last week, but the aboriginal community on B.C.’s North Coast has already benefited from years of progressive economic development that has flown under the radar, experts say.
Art Sterritt, executive director for Coastal First Nations, said the Lax Kw’alaams’s “straight-up business deal” to buy the logging rights to an area outside of nearby Terrace in 2005 eventually gave it the capital to diversify its economic portfolio, which now includes a handful of other businesses such as a helicopter charter company and a ferry corporation.
The band-owned Coast Tsimshian Resources bought the 518,000-hectare tree farm licence with a $9.8-million loan. When the recession started hurting Canadian lumber exports to the United States, band leadership targeted the East Asian market for its raw logs, travelling to China in 2007 to meet with companies there, and setting up a trade office in Beijing three years later.
