Understanding Consultation and Engagement with Indigenous Peoples in Resource Development

Canada’s legal system has repeatedly ruled that the Crown has a duty to consult with Indigenous Peoples when approving and shaping resource development projects that are located on their land or could infringe on their rights. But the duty to consult means different things to Indigenous groups, government and industry. Different understandings among stakeholders, in particular Indigenous groups dissatisfaction with consultation, has often led to court challenges of project decisions. Recently, the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn the federal government’s approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline project in 2018 has attracted the attention of politicians, media and the public. Legal challenges have also occurred over smaller, yet still important, activities and decisions, where Indigenous communities and organizations find formal consultation processes, and the overall approach to engagement taken by industry and government, to be lacking. While these represent a small portion of the total number of cases where the legal duty to consult has been triggered (Newman 2017) they have an outsized impact on the relationships and level of trust between Indigenous Peoples, industry and governments. Finding ways to resolve these conflicts and improve relations can contribute to reconciliation between Indigenous Peoples, non-Indigenous Canadians and the Canadian state and is essential to the future of Canada’s natural resource industries

Indigenous Policy Conference Summary Report: Beyond Reconciliation

The School of Public Policy (SPP) at the University of Calgary organized a conference to announce the establishment of its Indigenous Policy program and to share knowledge and stories about policy issues critical to Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The conference, titled “Beyond Reconciliation,” was held at the University of Calgary Downtown Campus on Nov. 21, 2016 and was attended by 73 participants. This included Indigenous elders, chiefs and leaders, and members of Indigenous organizations, including a women’s group. Also included were members of universities and academic institutions, including students; industry representatives from the oil and gas, pipeline, forestry, electricity, legal and financial sectors; as well as representatives from government and regulatory agencies. The purpose of the conference was established with the following abstract, which was circulated to speakers and participants: The School of Public Policy is establishing a new Indigenous Policy program in order to produce widely disseminated research and engage in outreach that covers an array of policy areas, such as health, education, self-government, and natural resource development. The program will directly engage Indigenous communities in the search for original, long-term, and evidence-based solutions, as part of an effort to improve our national capacity in problem-solving and policy development. The conference will provide a platform to launch the program, showcasing preliminary research and providing a venue for discussion of policy solutions. The conference included three moderated panel sessions and a keynote speaker.1 The first panel considered business and entrepreneurship in Indigenous communities; the second panel showcased case studies that are examining the experiences of Indigenous communities with natural resource development projects, and particularly their experiences with consultation and engagement. The final panel focused on ways of improving the consultation and engagement process with Indigenous communities. This report summarizes both the presentations and the major themes explored at the conference. The purpose is to capture the ideas and debates emerging from the conference, and provide an overview of the day for interested policy-makers and the public. The report begins with an outline of the agenda, before summarizing each of the panel sessions and the keynote speaker’s presentation. The concluding section provides a discussion of the key themes emerging from the conference and next steps for policy-makers and researchers. Three students enrolled in the SPP’s Master of Public Policy program took detailed notes throughout the day. The authors thank them for their thoroughness. The student notes and the authors’ notes were used to inform this report

The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Coverage of Carbon Pricing Instruments for Canadian Provinces

In this paper we provide a comparison of the coverage of Canadian carbon pricing systems. We define coverage as the proportion and types of emissions priced under the various systems, by emissions source. We compare provincially announced pricing systems to the federal benchmark (the minimum coverage provinces must meet) and the federal backstop, the pricing system that will be imposed on provinces with insufficient coverage or who opt to not develop their own policies. For those provinces that have not yet introduced a carbon price we look only at coverage under the federal benchmark and the federal backstop. We find the majority of provincial pricing systems meet or exceed the federal benchmark. Our results also point to the importance of additional complementary policies to address significant sources of unpriced emissions, primarily in agriculture and fugitive sources

Thymic-Shared Antigen-1 (TSA-1) A Lymphostromal Cell Membrane Ly-6 Superfamily Molecule with a Putative Role in Cellular Adhesion

The seeding and colonization of the thymus by bone marrow stem cells and the maturation of these cells into mature T lymphocytes are dependent on cell-surface recognition events between different cell lineages within the thymic microenvironment. Positive and negative selection processes within the thymus produce a peripheral T-cell repertoire capable of recognizing peptides derived from foreign antigen bound to self MHC molecules. In addition to the TCR/ MHC-peptide interaction, many other cell-surface molecules act in concert to regulate the kinetics of cellular interactions and intracellular signaling events during thymopoiesis. We have investigated the complexity of the thymic stroma by using monoclonal antibodies to clone cellmembrane molecules of thymic stromal cells. Thymic-shared antigen-1 (TSA-1) is a molecule of interest because it is expressed by both immature thymocytes and stromal cells. We report herein the structural and evolutionary relationships between TSA-1 and molecules of the Ly-6 superfamily (Ly-6SF), and present evidence that TSA-1 functions as a cell-surface receptor by binding a cognate cell target molecule on the surface of a subset of thymocytes

Energy and Environmental Policy Trends: Carbon Rebates Unlikely to Undermine Incentives

Effective April 1, 2019 the Government of Canada will tax carbon emissions in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Ninety per cent of the revenue will be rebated directly to households. By 2022, the rebate to Saskatchewan households will average $1,400 annually

Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with REINFORCE

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works have either required exact gradients or state-action visitation measure based mini-batch stochastic gradients with a diverging batch size, which limit their applicability in practical scenarios. In this paper, we consider classical policy gradient methods that compute an approximate gradient with a single trajectory or a fixed size mini-batch of trajectories under soft-max parametrization and log-barrier regularization, along with the widely-used REINFORCE gradient estimation procedure. By controlling the number of "bad" episodes and resorting to the classical doubling trick, we establish an anytime sub-linear high probability regret bound as well as almost sure global convergence of the average regret with an asymptotically sub-linear rate. These provide the first set of global convergence and sample efficiency results for the well-known REINFORCE algorithm and contribute to a better understanding of its performance in practice.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2021. Fixed typos in constants and enriched the literature revie

Carry-Over Effects of Forest Fragmentation on Breeding Adult Wood Thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina)

Full annual cycle research has become increasingly important as more evidence is found of connections between events that occur during different periods of the annual cycle, sometimes thousands of kilometers apart. For instance, long term negative carry-over effects arising from poor quality wintering habitat in the tropics have been shown to reduce future reproductive success and survival. Habitat loss and fragmentation on the breeding grounds have a negative effect on immediate breeding success of many bird species; however, short-term impacts on adult body condition and long-term impacts on migration and survival have not been studied. Individuals occupying small forest fragments are expected to experience high rates of cowbird brood parasitism, higher nest predation, and lower food availability which could directly delay fall migration due to timing constraints from late re-nesting or indirectly delay migration if adults are in poorer condition. If small fragments are lower quality habitat, breeding adults are also expected to have lower relative mass, and higher baseline levels of blood corticosterone. During the 2016-2019 breeding seasons, I fitted 117 adult Wood Thrushes with coded radio-tags in a variety of large and small forest fragments in Norfolk County, Ontario, to track their movements using Motus. For two years of the study, I also collected blood samples to measure corticosterone levels. I found that fragment size was related to many vegetation variables (e.g. density of trees, shrubs, groundcover) as expected, but it did not have a strong effect on relative mass or blood corticosterone of adults. Contrary to prediction, season-long reproductive success was also not lower in small fragments. In addition, I found that fall migration timing and annual survival were also not related to fragment size. Overall, I found no evidence that breeding habitat quality has a significant negative short-term or long-term effect on Wood Thrushes. This suggests that small forest fragments can provide good quality breeding habitat for forest songbirds and differences in quality between small and large fragments are not strong enough to trigger the kinds of negative carry-over effects that have been documented in other species on the wintering grounds

Carry-Over Effects of Forest Fragmentation on Breeding Adult Wood Thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina)

Full annual cycle research has become increasingly important as more evidence is found of connections between events that occur during different periods of the annual cycle, sometimes thousands of kilometers apart. For instance, long term negative carry-over effects arising from poor quality wintering habitat in the tropics have been shown to reduce future reproductive success and survival. Habitat loss and fragmentation on the breeding grounds have a negative effect on immediate breeding success of many bird species; however, short-term impacts on adult body condition and long-term impacts on migration and survival have not been studied. Individuals occupying small forest fragments are expected to experience high rates of cowbird brood parasitism, higher nest predation, and lower food availability which could directly delay fall migration due to timing constraints from late re-nesting or indirectly delay migration if adults are in poorer condition. If small fragments are lower quality habitat, breeding adults are also expected to have lower relative mass, and higher baseline levels of blood corticosterone. During the 2016-2019 breeding seasons, I fitted 117 adult Wood Thrushes with coded radio-tags in a variety of large and small forest fragments in Norfolk County, Ontario, to track their movements using Motus. For two years of the study, I also collected blood samples to measure corticosterone levels. I found that fragment size was related to many vegetation variables (e.g. density of trees, shrubs, groundcover) as expected, but it did not have a strong effect on relative mass or blood corticosterone of adults. Contrary to prediction, season-long reproductive success was also not lower in small fragments. In addition, I found that fall migration timing and annual survival were also not related to fragment size. Overall, I found no evidence that breeding habitat quality has a significant negative short-term or long-term effect on Wood Thrushes. This suggests that small forest fragments can provide good quality breeding habitat for forest songbirds and differences in quality between small and large fragments are not strong enough to trigger the kinds of negative carry-over effects that have been documented in other species on the wintering grounds