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McLeod was outraged by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s imposition without consultation of a ban on drilling in the Arctic in late 2016, alongside then United States President Barack Obama. Trudeau also announced a ban on oil tankers on Canada’s northern West Coast and made it more difficult for liquefied natural gas and pipelines to go ahead. All were big wins for the green lobby. The measures put the brakes on development in big parts of northern Canada, where many Indigenous people live and where resource extraction is pretty much the only game in town.

Since then Donald Trump has re-opened the door to Arctic drilling on the U.S. side, and U.S. oil production and exports are booming, making Canada’s continuing restraint look naïve.

In an interview, McLeod said the drilling ban has been a big blow for his region’s economy and for the future prospects of Northern Indigenous communities.

“People expected we would be the last frontier,” he said. “We had all this significant oil and gas resources, especially in the offshore, and for over a year now we haven’t had a single molecule of oil and gas being produced in the NWT.”

The Beaufort Delta region is struggling economically and importing fuel for heating and transportation despite sitting on huge resources, he said.

People expected we would be the last frontier Rob McLeod, NWT Premier

Companies that made $2.6 billion in offshore work commitments pulled out and the federal government is now asking them what it would take to give up their leases for good. Another big hope for economic development, the Mackenzie Gas Project, was finally put on ice last December, after a drawn-out environmental assessment process made it uneconomic versus new sources of natural gas from shale.