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According to Blueberry River Chief Marvin Vahey, the First Nation's traditional lands have been "ravaged" since 1900, when their ancestors signed Treaty 8 and legally bound the Crown to the promise that First Nations would be able to hunt, trap, fish, and harvest traditional medicines from their lands forever."Blueberry's ancestors would not recognize our territory today," Vahey wrote in a statement accompanying the claim. "It is covered by oil and gas wells, roads, pipelines, mines, clearcuts, hydro and seismic lines, private land holdings, and waste disposal sites, among other things."The pace and scale of development have accelerated in the last 25 years, and are now at unprecedented levels."Maps released by the First Nation along with the statement of claim show a territory almost entirely consumed by various industrial projects over the past several decades, with 90.8 percent of land disturbed by industrial projects, and a vast portion of the southern territory in line to be flooded by Site C.
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When it comes to grappling with the gravity of cumulative impacts on the environment, Innes said the missing piece is not a matter of missing science."It's not like we don't know better," he said. "Cumulative effects have been part of environmental assessment policy and practice for 20 years or more."Instead, Innes argues that the regulatory system is essentially incapable of meaningfully addressing development on more than a case-by-case basis."The way cumulative effects are dealt with is cursory, at best," he said. "Review panels tend to trip over them on the way out the door, or regulators basically say it's too hard, where they'll provide direction on say a single well, but say it's not their mandate to set policy for cumulative effects."It's a matter of passing the buck, Innes said, whereby no regulator is properly equipped to enforce thresholds on development, allowing governments to continue approving projects, undeterred."It's a damning indictment of those who design and implement regulatory systems that set these guys up to fail, where they are given mandates that they can't fulfill," he said of the Blueberry suit. "It's cases like this that forces the government to take their blinders off and stare, I hope, in horror at what they've created."Similar fight occurring across the border
Blueberry River is not the only First Nation attempting to force a new precedent in aboriginal case law in Canada when it comes to cumulative effects.
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