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“These are communities that need real sustainable, substantial economic benefit, where Indigenous people have been locked out of the market economy for 150 years, since Confederation. They’ve been wanting in for a long period of time.”

Woodfibre LNG gained trust through five years of consultations and by agreeing to abide by conditions under the nation’s environmental and cultural assessment process (which operates separately from federal and provincial regimes), said Khelsilem, a spokesman for the Squamish Nation council, and one of its councillors who voted against the proposal in a close 8-6 vote.

These are complex issues and you're always going to have people on both sides

In return for its support, the community is to receive annual and milestone payments totalling $226 million over the 40-year life of the project, and its companies will be in line to bid on up to $872 million in contracts.

Hundreds of jobs are expected to result for the nation’s 4,000 members, nearly half of whom live off reserve in the Greater Vancouver area.

Khelsilem, who uses one name, said the product involved in each project — Woodfibre LNG’s relatively benign natural gas versus the “extreme risk” of diluted bitumen from the oilsands in the Trans Mountain pipeline — was just one of several factors in the decision to back one and fight the other.

“I think that if governments want to work with First Nations to create economic development, there’s ways to do it. And our nation like many other First Nations are saying, ‘We want to do it, we want to do responsible economic development and there are ways for the government to work with us on that,”‘ he said.