The Plan Nord in Northern Québec, Canada: Pathway to Peace and Prosperity or Powder Keg?

ABSTRACT

In 2011, the Government of Québec, Canada announced an ambitious twenty-five-year plan to develop the province’s northern region—an area nearly twice the size of France. A centrepiece of the Plan Nord is to integrate the province’s various Indigenous peoples in the sustainable development of the region. However, there are early warning signs of the potential for future conflict as some Indigenous groups mobilized opposition against proposed developments. This raises important questions: could the plan enhance prospects for improved cooperation between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous groups or is it likely to engender conflict? Which factors explain the diverging levels of support for the plan between the region’s principal Indigenous peoples (i.e. Cree, Inuit, Innu)? The paper uses the ‘sons of the soil’ (SoS) conflict framework to theorize the mechanisms that can give rise to—or prevent the escalation of—Indigenous and non-Indigenous conflict in northern Québec. Though typically applied to case studies in the Global South, the SoS conflict framework provides a novel approach for understanding the contentious politics surrounding land, territory, and natural resource development in settler-colonial contexts.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Meeting in Nashville (2022), and at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (2022). The authors wish to thank the participants and, notably, the discussants (Liam Midzain-Gobin at ISA, Chanda Meek at University of Alaska Fairbanks) for their thoughtful questions, comments, and suggestions. The paper also benefited from the thorough and constructive feedback from an anonymous reviewer. We would also like to thank the editors at Ethnopolitics for their editorial guidance, and Emma York and Badriyya Yusuf for their superb research assistance. Finally, we acknowledge the financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded this research through an Insight Grant.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As observed by one of the authors in June 2022 during the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada meetings in Toronto—the most important global annual gathering of mining sector investors.

2 Following common practice, we employ the term ‘Indigenous’ when referring to an ethno-national identity (e.g., Inuit in Canada, Native Americans in the United States) and ‘indigenous’ when referring to local indigenous communities.

3 The province of Québec is a province within the wider Canadian federation, which includes ten provinces and three territories. As Rocher and Smith (2003, p. 21) note: ‘Canada’s system of government possesses all the features normally attributed to a federation: two orders of government, a Constitution in which the distribution of powers between the two levels of government are specified and independent revenue sources for each level of government are guaranteed, provisions for representations of regions in central political institutions, judicial review, a formula for constitutional amendment, and mechanisms for intergovernmentalism’.

4 Authors’ translation from French.

5 Authors’ translation from French.

6 Authors’ translation from French.

7 Authors’ translation from French.

8 This can be translated into English as the Foundation for Territorial Equity, the Association for the Rights of Whites, and the Pioneers of Sept-Îles.

9 Authors’ translation from French.

10 See Capone (2014) on the group ‘Innu Power’, which has been more publicly supportive of violent protests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2017-0387].