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Mr. Lalonde wouldn’t comment on Idle No More, saying it’s political and he is no politician. He’s taking a different path to prosperity.

“We are businessmen,” Mr. Lalonde, a member of the Driftpile First Nation near Slave Lake, said in an interview in Calgary this week, where the group of aboriginal companies he leads, as yet unnamed, has set up an office to be close to energy company headquarters, bid for contracts and act as the go-to-guys for skilled and unskilled aboriginal labour.

“I think [Idle No More activists] are talking more of a resource share, but I am not sure that will ever come about,” he said. “I think what will happen here is they have to create their own economic opportunities to be self-sufficient and run their own self-government.”

Mr. Lalonde is building on a growing number of entrepreneurial successes among Canada’s First Nations. It started in Fort McMurray, with the leadership of chief Jim Boucher of the Fort McKay First Nation, and then trickled down across the country as other First Nations took notice of the upside of business ownership.

The Fort McKay Group of Companies began in 1986 with one janitorial contract. It has since mushroomed into a series of enterprises that offer logistics, site services, fuel and lube delivery, environmental services and land leasing operations to oil sands developers.

Nathan Elliott, president of Insightwest Research, a Regina-based research and consulting firm that works closely with First Nations wanting to participate in the resource economy, said aboriginal business in the Wood Buffalo region around Fort McMurray, where there are five major bands, has grown in value to more than $1-billion a year in 2012, from $700-million in 2009.