Canada’s government should not proceed with mega-pipeline projects unless it gets the consent of First Nations peoples whose land could be affected by such development, a United Nations report released Monday said.

James Anaya, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said in the report that Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper’s government has failed in its duty to consult and accommodate indigenous peoples before developing natural resource programs – including the controversial Alberta tar sands project.

This “leads to an atmosphere of contentiousness and mistrust,” Anaya said.

The special rapporteur listed two tar sands pipeline projects — Enbridge's Northern Gateway from Alberta to the British Columbia coast and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain — at the top of a list of development projects from which aboriginal leaders said they had been largely excluded.

The special rapporteur said that during his fact-finding mission last year he “repeatedly heard from aboriginal leaders that they are not opposed to development in their lands generally and go to great lengths to participate in such consultation processes as are available, but that these are generally inadequate … and usually take place at a stage when project proposals have already been developed.”

This “creates an unnecessarily adversarial framework of opposing interests, rather than facilitating the common creation of mutually beneficial development,” Anaya said.