The Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation’s Mission to Provide Economic Self-Sufficiency
This week, our guest is Matt Jamieson, President and CEO of the Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation (SNGRDC). SNGRDC’s mission is to achieve economic self-sufficiency for their community by 2030.
The Six Nations of the Grand River is located near Toronto and is Canada’s most populated First Nation, with just over 30,000 members. The Nation has established the Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation, which has a separate governance and decision-making structure from the Nation’s political decision-making structure. The corporation has become an equity partner in a variety of renewable energy projects, including transmission, wind, solar, and battery storage. The corporation has ambitious goals for delivering economic benefits to the community, targeting $150 million annually by 2030 in direct economic impact to the Nation.
Here are some of the questions Peter and Jackie asked Matt Jamieson: Why was a separate governance structure used for the corporation? What types of projects are you involved in? How did you finance your equity share in these projects with your partners? Tell us about the Niagara Reinforcement Line and the Oneida Energy Storage Project? How has consultation with Indigenous communities on these types of projects changed over the past decade? What are your thoughts on the Fall Economic Statement that the Liberal government could introduce a multibillion-dollar loan program to help Indigenous groups in Canada buy equity in resource projects? What is your advice to Indigenous communities and companies who want to work with them on how to get started?
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Episode 221 transcript.
Speaker 1:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas Podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Speaker 2:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the Arc Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back. Well, I’m looking at the calendar here, and we’re flipped into December, which is hard to believe because time flies, as the saying goes. We’ve motored through Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween, American Thanksgiving, and now we’re headed straight towards Christmas and the holiday season. But we missed a day, didn’t we?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. We didn’t do anything for Truth and Reconciliation, and I know we had done a podcast a while ago on how Enbridge had worked with the consortium of First Nations groups and Indigenouscommunities to sell off a portion of their pipeline. We wanted to continue with that theme, especially I remembered on September 30th that we really should do another story like that because Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, which I did reread on Truth and Reconciliation Day talks about how corporate Canada should be part of that as well.
Peter Tertzakian:
It’s important, and our special guest today is going to help lead us through that. So, I think it’s only appropriate that we also start off with a land acknowledgement and where we are here in Calgary, Alberta. And then we’ll turn it over to our guest who’s on different lands, and he can tell us exactly which traditional lands he comes from. So, we acknowledge, Jackie, here that this land is a traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, including the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations, the Tsuu’tina, Stoney Nakoda, including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney Nations. And the City of Calgary is also home to the historic Northwest Metis and Calgary is the home of the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.
Jackie Forrest:
Wow. That’s impressive, Peter.
Peter Tertzakian:
Okay.
Jackie Forrest:
That’s quite a lot of different communities you named off there.
Peter Tertzakian:
I know, and it’s really an impressive and storied history going back millennia. But in the here and the now and the today, I’m delighted to introduce our special guest, who is Matt Jamieson, the President, and CEO of the Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation, which is on a mission to achieve economic self-sufficiency by 2030. So welcome, Matt.
Matt Jamieson:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Peter Tertzakian:
Great.
Jackie Forrest:
Matt, maybe first tell us where are you located? What lands are you on?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah, I’m located in southwestern Ontario, just west of the GTA on the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations traditional homeland, first recognized in the 1701 Nanfan Treaty, and later in the 1784 Haldimand Proclamation.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, Matt, we want to learn more about where you’re from. So maybe tell us a little bit more about the Six Nations of the Grand River. How many people are members of the Nation?
Matt Jamieson:
Sure, Jackie. So, Six Nations of the Grand River is the most populated First Nation in Canada. We have just over 30,000 members, and about half of them live within the territory on reserve with a balance living in the region around us. And we’ve been here since time immemorial, first recognized in the 1701 Nanfan Treaty.
Currently Six Nations of the Grand River is located in the Haldimand Proclamation lands of 1784. The Haldimand Proclamation lands were basically a grant from the crown to the Six Nations people in consideration for our alliance with the British crown during the American Revolution. Originally the Haldimand Proclamation was 975,000 acres of land, and now over the course of history, it’s been whittled down to 46,500 acres. So, during that time, obviously there’s been just a tremendous amount of things in the past that happened, some very damaging to our community. And ultimately for us at Six Nations, we are charting a course into the future to help pursue that reconciliation and provide a better future for our children.
Peter Tertzakian:
So, you are the CEO of the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation, which is involved in renewable energy development. Tell us a little bit about how you got to be the CEO.
Matt Jamieson:
First of all, I grew up on Six Nations and spent many years here. And then I left the community in 1996 to pursue a completely different career in a different field altogether. And in 2003, I was asked by the then current chief of the elected council to return to help them with their economic development. When I landed here in 2009, I quickly realized that the community, despite its location geographically and its population base, really didn’t have much by way of the way of economic development. And so I worked from 2009 until about 2015 under the council umbrella to create what has now become the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation. So really at that time, I was the architect, if you will, of that corporate structure. And by virtue of my role as the architect, the council appointed me as the Founding CEO, and I’ve been in that role ever since.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s talk about that. Your setup is quite unique, I think, from any other First Nation businesses as you have a separate governance and decision-making structure from the political decision making. So, talk about that. Why did you think that was important and how hard was that to accomplish?
Matt Jamieson:
Well, first of all, I think it’s critically important. There was the Harvard study on American Indian economic development that we really utilized as somewhat of a playbook for the rationale behind the formation of our development corporation. And that study really speaks to the political interference that can happen between politics and business.
And so, the solution in our minds at that point where, how do we build a structure that was grounded in the values of our community and yet enabled us to conduct business in a way that was not influenced by the political cycles of elected governments? And so, we went through a very long process with the community, in community information sessions and engagement sessions where we had coffee and tea in people’s living rooms, at that depth, to help gauge and assess the community’s concerns and frankly distrust towards corporate structures so that when we did actually move forward with the structure, it was reflective of those values and the sensitivities in our community.
Our model itself is very unique for Six Nations because we do have a troubled history and a history that’s built and has been cultivated in a very negative way over a number of years. So we had to walk softly and be careful to fully appreciate the community’s concerns around corporate structures.
Ultimately, the structure we ended up on is a corporation that’s wholly owned by the Six Nations elected council. We do have an independent board of directors that essentially stand in the shoes of the shareholder and take on and carry out much of what might be considered a shareholder’s responsibility. And they do so in a way that’s completely autonomous from the elected government. And that to me has really been the secret ingredient. That corporate structure, that corporate governance model has allowed us to execute business plans that in some cases have taken over five years from start to finish.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, building trust is something that certainly takes a long time and seems to be taking especially along these days in this world of chaos. So, you’ve gone from distrust of corporations and corporate structures to some pretty ambitious goals that target $150 million annually by the end of the decade for its direct economic impact to the Nation. Can you talk about where that goal came from and how the consensus was built around that goal?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah, sure. I mean, ultimately our goal is to create that community wealth and economic self-sufficiency. A lot of that hinges on profit. We need to generate profit in order to provide for the basic necessities in our community. When we launched the Economic Development Corporation in 2015, the annual operating budget for our community was a hundred million dollars. And so we sort of put a pin in a hundred million dollars in terms of what is the actual net cash contribution we need to provide those services. But then we hit the brakes and hit pause and said, “Listen, we don’t want to just meet the minimum standard. We want to provide a more bountiful future.” And so, we selected 150 million to be that much better than what we thought we were at the time. And that’s where it started.
I think that that was a way for us to really conceptualize where we’re going. At the same time, we also have at a comprehensive community plan, a 20-year community plan. And so we utilize that to help inform some of our strategic decisions around investments in energy sectors. And it really helped crystallize a vision of the future. It’s an aspirational goal. It’s a big goal. It’s a goal that we’ve worked very hard to stay focused on in everything that we do. And you know what? We’re plugging away. I think we have, what, seven years left.
Peter Tertzakian:
So, tell us, you’re plugging away. You’ve been plugging away since 2015, I think you said. We’re sort of halfway to 2030 from 2015-ish. Are you on track for that 150 million goal?
Matt Jamieson:
In 2023, we just did a calculation for this year, we’re going to generate about $50 million.
Peter Tertzakian:
Wow.
Matt Jamieson:
So, we do have a way to go, but we’ve done that in a relatively short timeframe, and it’s taken us a number of years to get up and running. We launched in 2015, so we’re not that old of a company. It’s taken some time to build a reputation in the market. And I think that our actions, our success, and our demonstration that we have the ability to execute at the highest levels are leading just tremendous opportunities to us. And frankly, we spend a lot of time right now responding to interested counterparties who in some cases need us way more than we need them.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s talk about some of these projects. That’s amazing, by the way, and maybe we’ll come back to some of the benefits that’s providing to the community, but I’m sure our listeners are curious about where the 50 million is coming from. So maybe tell us about the types of projects that are generating this income for you and what type of projects they are and what kind of equity share you have in them.
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah. So, we have two downstream structures in terms of our corporate interests. We have what we characterize as Nation enterprises. These are businesses that the development corporation runs in the community. Those are hospitality, commercial operations, and things of that nature. That’s a big payroll for our community and does create a profitability to our bottom line. But our major source of profit is our economic interests or our investments that are made outside of the community, outside of the reserve proper, if you will. So, over the course of the last number of years, we’ve invested quite heavily in the utility scale wind and solar. We participate in 890 megawatts of wind and solar by way of equity investments from as small as a 10% equity interest to as large as a 50% equity interest in Ontario’s second-largest wind farm, the Niagara Regional Wind Farm, which is 203 megawatts.
So, we’ve been at that game for quite some time. And during that time, we have a better understanding of the market, how the market operates. And that led us on this journey of energy storage. So, we’ve spent the last number of years pursuing an energy storage solution here in the province of Ontario. Most recently, we partnered with two companies. The first one, NRStor, on a 250-megawatt energy storage, the first of its kind in Canada, 1000-megawatt hour, the largest in Canada. Quickly followed by a secondary project that we were just awarded, another partnership with Boralex, which is a 300-megawatt energy storage. So, we’ve got 890 megawatts of wind and solar and 550 megawatts of energy storage currently contracted.
Jackie Forrest:
Wow, that’s amazing. We’ll come to some of that in terms of the projects, but I think the next question might be, how did your corporation finance the equity share in these projects in general? I’m sure it’s different for each one, but.
Matt Jamieson:
I think first off, it’s important to say that you can’t put an Indigenous community on a reserve and isolate them for hundreds of years and then expect them to miraculously have a balance sheet to make investments. And that’s the case, not just with Six Nations, but all First Nations in Canada. So back in 2009, 2010, when the Green Energy Act passed, and it was all of this movement in renewables, it was a very steep learning curve for us. We didn’t understand the industry, we didn’t understand the economics, and so we had to move very quickly. So, at that time, we were forced to develop a game plan, which in many cases allowed, or required the sponsor to fund our equity upfront. So, we would lean on them to utilize their balance sheet to borrow money from the sponsor to make our equity investments, and then utilize a waterfall structure for distributions to pay them back with the residual flowing to the community.
Once you then prove out that business model, you can go and pursue instruments in the market like the Aboriginal Loan Guarantee Program, for example, to take out that equity with more attractive commercial financing. We also have a number of strategic partnerships. As we know, one of Canada’s largest First Nations, we do have the Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank present in our communities. We’ve worked very closely with them for traditional financing solutions on some of our equity investments. So, we don’t really have a prescribed model. It really hinges on the bankability of the asset and the strength of our partnership and their willingness to work with us to help finance our equity until such time as we can demonstrate a cashflow.
Peter Tertzakian:
So, there’s the community, and associated with First Nations communities are governance structures, and I’ll call it the politics of those governance structures. But you’re a corporation. So can you talk for a bit about the relationship between, I’ll call it the community political governance and the corporate governance, and how that works?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah. I think it’s safe to say that Six Nations is a complicated political ecosystem here. We have a traditional government that’s very much active. We have an elected government, which is very much active. They don’t always get along. So, we’ve had to navigate that in very sensitive ways. So, when we created this development corporation, the governance model was such that neither political body had a seat on the board. The elected council has a seat, but it’s ex-officio, non-voting member of the board of directors.
Our board of directors is actually composed of a diverse group of community members who are traditional followers and walkers. And when they put their hats on to conduct board business, they do it under the goal or the mission of their corporation, not under their personal views or biases. I think that with the stated goals that we have, the charter structure that we have in place, I think that it’s been wildly successful to be able to just recognize, first of all, that we have this political ecosystem, the challenges with it. Let’s recognize that upfront, but let’s not let that disrupt progress. Let’s stay focused on our ultimate goal of Autonomy 150, and how do we collectively achieve it as a people, because we’re all in this together. So, I think we’ve done a very good job at the board table of putting those matters aside for another day and focusing on what really matters for now.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and getting significant economic benefits to the community probably helps people like some of these projects more than they might’ve in the past. A great example maybe, tell us about this Niagara Reinforcement Line and the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation’s role in helping to restart a project that had been stranded for a decade. And I want to just to add an additional question to it. I’m assuming if it was stranded for a decade, some folks in the community didn’t like the project. So how did you, with all the governance structures you have, address those people’s concerns so the project could move forward?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah. So, the Niagara Reinforcement Line was a project that was stalled way back in mid-2000s. It was stalled largely at the request of the province and Hydro One at the time, due to sensitivities around the Douglas Creek Estates, a land occupation that happened outside of Caledonia. Because of that sensitivity, the government and Hydro One decided that, hey, let’s just pause this project and wait for a sunnier day. It is a sensitive location. An Agra transmission line runs right behind that property, and it was something that had high visibility to our community members. So, there was a number of years where that line sat idle. Over 10 years, it sat there and did nothing, and it was a stranded asset. I used to drive by it every day to take my child to school and always wonder whether or not this is going to get continued or just dismantled.
Through the course of our journey of partnership and pursuit of opportunity, we had partnered with Aecon Group, Aecon Utilities to create a joint venture with them, the A6N, which is now the general partnership. And through that general partnership, we were able to build the capacity and skill sets and experience and reputation, execute contracts and conduct high caliber work. So having driven back and forth across the transmission line every day for a number of years, I was always puzzled by why there couldn’t be a solution brought forward from Six Nations ourselves. So, it was through that thinking that we approached the province of Ontario and Hydro One with a solution, which was contract A6N general partnership to put together the capacity and the skill sets with the backing of Aecon to actually execute the work and get it done. In exchange, of course, the quid pro quo was that we wanted an equity ownership in the transmission line. A6N, the construction company would do the work and our people would get jobs and experience.
And you know what? Through a number of years, we were ultimately able to come to an economic bargain with Ontario to provide a solution that ultimately benefited all the rate payers. I mean, it was a well over $100 million stranded asset. The rate payers were on the hook, including community member rate payers. So, we knew that there was a solution to be had. We just had to sit down and put the right deal structure together.
At the same time, we also knew the sensitivities of the project in relation to the Douglas Creek Estates lands. So we went through a comprehensive community outreach session, where we had meetings in the community, we had webinars, we had writing campaigns, and we utilized those meetings to gather and harness the community feedback and the sensitivity so that as we move forward and advance the solution, we did it with our eyes wide open, taking what we heard from the community to heart and identifying and doing what we can to mitigate those sensitivities.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, so you did a lot of work. I mean, it’s quite a different dynamic with you leading it, I think, than people from Toronto coming from Hydro One. Do you think that’s really what ultimately made it successful, is having the community? And I imagine the community has a fair equity share, which created more buy-in for the project as well as the previous structure would’ve had no buy-in for the community?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah, no, exactly. So, I mean, I think there’s been an evolution going on right now in terms of economic participation. What used to be done in the old days is that a developer would come to the door with a canned product and say, “Hey, Indigenous community, this is what you’re going to get.” And I think that the Niagara Reinforcement Line was part of the transformation that’s happened, which is solutions that are identified by the community are brought forward by the community, which are homegrown solutions that are supported by dev-co’s and the council and things of those nature, they’re much more apt to get community support than those that are just where somebody comes and knocks on the door with a solution that’s canned and don’t want to hear your feedback. The evolution of those types of relationships are the United Energy Storage Project, as an example, where we were actually a lead developer. We brought that solution. We weren’t responding to a procurement; we weren’t responding to a proposal from a third party.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, maybe tell us about that project, the United Development Storage Project.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah.
Matt Jamieson:
Well, the United Energy Storage Project was something we’ve been working on since 2018. The reason why we started working on it is we are, as I mentioned, an investor in large scale wind and solar. We as an investor saw firsthand the impact of curtailment on our investments. When you look at the size of curtailment, you also can’t help but consider the impact on the rate payer. Of course, our values is to pursue a clean net-zero future. We know we want more renewables in and around our region, but as an investor in those, we saw the inefficiencies of the grid, we saw the curtailment happening. We also heard from the regional stakeholders; some folks had turbine fatigue. They didn’t want anymore. They were tired of looking at them. Part of the reason they’re tired of looking at them is because they saw them turning and they saw their IDA rates going up and so we realized that “You know what. Geez, there’s a way for us, I think, to harness this value and be able to demonstrate savings for the rate payer, at the same time mitigate greenhouse gases.”
We knew conceptually in our minds that we wanted to find a storage solution. We just didn’t know enough about the market to actually advance the idea. We were fortunate enough, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with NRStor, a small boutique development in Toronto, and we were able to put our minds together to come up with this concept of utility grid facing energy storage, lithium battery storage solution. From 2018 until 2021, 2022, we spent our time working with the province of Ontario with the Ministry of Energy, with Hydro One, with the IESO to share with them the value proposition of large-scale energy storage. Over the course of time with NRStor, we were able to bring in other equity investors into the deal and so now we have Northland Power who have a large equity position, and we also have our longstanding partner, Aecon, who is an equity investor, and also the EPC contractor.
Peter Tertzakian:
Can you talk a little bit about this Oneida Storage project from the perspective of size and scale, just to give our audience a sense of … when you say grid scale, what does that mean? What size of community, how many megawatt hours of storage does it have?
Matt Jamieson:
It will be the largest energy storage project in Canada, the third largest in North America. It’s a 250-megawatt plant with a four-hour cycle time, so a thousand-megawatt hours. It’s a solution that doesn’t exist in the market. Part of it is because the energy grid operates the way it does because frankly, that’s the way it’s always operated. Now this was a solution, a bilateral solution where energy comes one way and goes the other. That really doesn’t exist at that scale. The value proposition of energy storage is that you can harness energy when it’s being created and utilize it at a later point and provide instantaneous power solutions to the grid, which Ontario doesn’t have now. It’s essentially adding a new tool to the toolbox.
Peter Tertzakian:
What fills these batteries? Is it purely renewables like the wind farms you’re talking about? Or does it also plug into some of the fraction of Ontario’s other energy mix, including nukes and …
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah, part of the overall energy mix, but it’s located in an area in close proximity to our large wind and solar assets. By virtue of that location, it will harness that value.
Peter Tertzakian:
What is the status of this now? Is it up and running, or when is it going to be complete?
Matt Jamieson:
Project itself is under construction right now. The target date for commercial operation is May 2025.
Jackie Forrest:
Matt, you say that you’d brought that to the provincial government as a solution, but now the provincial government in Ontario has put out more requests for proposals for battery storage projects. Do you think that your innovation and what you’ve done has actually educated them on the value of these projects and helped position more of these procurements that have gone out?
Matt Jamieson:
Certainly, in my view, absolutely. This wasn’t part of the narrative when we came to the government in 2018, 2019. It was a learning process, not just for us at Six Nations, but also for the province, for the IESO. But as we went through and started analyzing the value proposition of large-scale storage, I think really the light bulb came on. This is a solution that we really need. That’s not to say they weren’t considering it because all IESO markets in probably the world know about energy storage, but I just don’t think that they were at the advanced stage that they are now. I think that the united projects helped crystallize the need for large scale storage and ultimately led to this current round of long-term one procurement with the IESO.
Jackie Forrest:
You are part of one of the other awards that went through that new procurement, right? Boralex’s 300-megawatt energy storage project? I wanted you to explain, as a developer working with a First Nation, do they have an advantage when those procurements go out and the government says everyone can put in their proposal? If you’re working with an Indigenous group, is there a benefit to a developer?
Matt Jamieson:
Sure. Well, under the LT1 bid process right now, if a proponent identifies an Indigenous community, depending upon their level of equity ownership in the project, they get priority points. There is a strategic advantage to partnering with Indigenous communities because you earn those priority points, which help you in the bid analysis for the IESO. That’s the way it is done now. Previously under the FIT program, developers would actually get an adder associated with the Indigenous participation, which means to say that if you had an Indigenous community with 50% equity ownership as an example, you would get X number of cents per kilowatt hour added to the contracted price, which would really make these contracts and partnerships attractive to developers. I’m not a huge fan of the current model under the LT1, but nonetheless, there is a value proposition in the scoring scheme that incentivizes developers to work with Indigenous communities.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, then I guess the other benefit is your help in terms of the consultation and getting buy-in from the community. Do you only develop projects that are on your lands or are you also developing projects further out in Ontario?
Matt Jamieson:
I’m just going to make a point on the community. Every project development, every financier, every bank, every underwriter wants certainty in projects. There is the duty to consult obligation and it’s a long history of court cases and what have you. Driving the need to engage and involve communities, there’s no better way to demonstrate Indigenous support than to demonstrate that the community itself has invested in the project. I believe equity participation goes a long ways to provide that certainty that lenders really need in order to advance that type of funding. To answer your second question, as I mentioned, Six Nations Reserve proper is only on 46,500 acres of land. We’re the largest, most populated First Nation in Canada. We need our land for homes. We don’t carry a lot of development activity within the reserve lands, partly because of the need for housing, but secondarily because there is no way or very little way to finance these large-scale projects on reserve, given the barriers of the Indian Act.
Almost all of our investment activities have taken place outside of the “Reserve lands”, some within the Haldimand Proclamation Lands and others within the 1701 treaty lands within the geographic radius of the community, let’s call it 50- or 60-kilometer radius of the community. Part of that’s motivated by we want to be able to put our people to work on these sites. We want them to be able to go there for the day and come home at night, and so we are typically focused on our regional economy here for those opportunities.
Peter Tertzakian:
Earlier on you talked about the politics of the community, the Six Nations as being, I think in your words, complicated and certainly First Nations governance is complicated from my experience as an observer. What happens to those politics as the Six Nations Corporation goes outside into other First Nations communities and they have their own politics? I mean, are you welcomed with open arms or are there sensitivities because of the historical tribal structures? I don’t know.
Matt Jamieson:
I mean, if we start with our own community lens, our pillars are transparency and accountability, things that we do with our community. Everything that we do project wise is always published for our community members to see and digest, which means that it’s also available for the public to see and digest. There are other regional Indigenous interests, overlapping treaty histories, overlapping land assertions. It’s complicated and we have made overtures to work with other Indigenous communities, in some cases successfully and in other cases not. That sort of always gravitates back to that political thinking. We are more than willing to approach a community to work together on a project and lend our experience and credibility to them to help advance potentially a project that they could invest alongside us. In some cases, it’s welcomed. In other cases, it isn’t.
But I could tell you the reason why it would not be welcomed. It’s not because of commercial terms, it’s because of political terms. We’ve got to accept the reality that it’s been a tough history for all of us. You know what? Everyone is trying to advance their own interests for their own people, and that’s understandable. They don’t necessarily want another community coming into their backyard taking what they may receive as an opportunity. We try to be sensitive to that. We prefer to work together. And you know what? If they don’t want us there, we don’t go there.
Jackie Forrest:
Matt, I want to talk a bit more about the financing. It sounds like you found ways to make it work even though you didn’t have a big balance sheet and that you could get the equity granted to you and then you pay them back over time with your profits, or you found structures that work. However, I think you probably would benefit from a structure like what the Liberal government is talking about. A couple of weeks ago in the fall economic update, they were talking about introducing a multi-billion-dollar loan program to help Indigenousgroups in Canada buy equity in resource projects, similar to the types of projects you’re involved in. What do you think can come out of this Liberal plan and do you think it will help you in future projects?
Matt Jamieson:
Absolutely. A plan like this is long overdue. In Ontario, they have the Aboriginal Loan Guarantee Program, which has been in place for quite some time. I’m hopeful that this new federal program maybe is a little bit, perhaps, more streamlined than the provincial solution we have today, which is not to say that I don’t value the provincial solution, I do, it’s just the timing to access the guarantee under the provincial program is almost a year from start to finish. And as you may be aware, projects can’t wait for up to a year to reach financial close.
And so there may be a need to continue to rely on sponsors to provide funding at financial close until they can be substituted with these types of loan guarantees, but I’m very hopeful this Liberal campaign for this loan program is successful. I think it will have tremendous uptake. I would be very interested to see how they roll that program up, how they prioritize things, whether there’s priority on a net-zero agenda and whether or not there’s priority on the quantity of Indigenous equity ownership in a project.
And because there’s going to be a limited pool of funds and there’s going to be just tremendous demand, you just think about the goal of net zero by 2030, we’re talking trillions and trillions of dollars of investment, all of which is going to have to take place on lands which are the subjects of a treaty or a land assertion or a land claim, all of which is going to require Indigenous participation. And as I said earlier, you can’t put a community on a reserve for hundreds of years and expect them to have the balance sheet to participate.
So, these types of long guarantee programs are fundamentally important to help those communities achieve their goals of partnering in the long-term solutions that this country needs. At the same time, there are other things, like the Canada Infrastructure Bank recently made an announcement on an equity loan program for Indigenous communities. And so I’m very optimistic that these types of programs are there. In fact, I think Ontario just announced an infrastructure program, as well, that may have Indigenous support. So the pieces of the puzzle are coming together, they just need to come together quickly and they need to come together in a way that they’re accessible and available to the communities when they need them.
Peter Tertzakian:
It seems to me things are coming together quite quickly. You’re demonstrating that projects are getting done, you’re demonstrating entrepreneurship. You’ve got these priority points that you get. So I suspect you have a pretty good queue of corporate interests that want to partner up with you. Can you talk about that and also talk about what corporate interests can do that may be interested in partnering with you? How do they call you up? How do they get started?
Matt Jamieson:
Yeah, good question. So we do have a lot of interest. We’ve been successful. We have a long ways to go. All Indigenous communities in this country have a long ways to go. It’s been a horrible history. We can’t be stuck in the past. We need to move into a future that demonstrates the spirit and cooperation to do things better and differently.
So, we do have a lot of interest from corporate interests who want to do business with us. Frankly, some of them need us more than we need them. Some of them are knocking on our door because they think they can get a grant or some other types of free money on government programming. That’s not what we do. We’re in this to actually participate at a real way and create value for all partners.
So the best way for a company to approach us is to come early, to come early with a concept or an idea, with a suggestion that we can do things together. And the Oneida Energy Storage is an example of that. That idea wasn’t born in the boardroom in Toronto or somewhere else, it was born in our boardroom and it crystallized by us having our fingerprints, our DNA on these things. If we can get our fingerprints and ownership interests on these projects, we have tremendous political influence and we can do things together much more quickly and much more impactfully if we do it together as opposed to being pitched a canned product that may or may not fit our overarching goals.
Jackie Forrest:
Matt, this has been a great conversation. I’ve learned a lot and I’m sure our listeners have, too. Last question is, what would your advice be to Indigenous groups that are listening to the podcast on how they could get started along the pathway you have shown with the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation?
Matt Jamieson:
Well, the key ingredient, I think, is separating business and politics. You have to have a structure that achieves that goal, but at the same time, has good governance systems so you can become a bankable counterparty. At the end of the day, when you pursue economic development opportunities, you need financing, you need to be able to partner with public companies. And public companies expect a counterparty that’s organized and prepared to do business and with those right governance structures.
So that would be the number one goal I would give to Indigenous communities, is to focus on getting that right first. The last thing you want to do is it’ll come out of the gate and not have your governance in the right place and something goes wrong, and not only does it damage you financially, but it damages you in the minds of your constituents and your community members by way of further distrust towards corporate interests, and we can’t have that. Right now, TRC #92 is a call to action to partner, and part of that equation is when Indigenous communities get organized for that partnership.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, great. Well, unfortunately, time’s up. It’s time to say goodbye and wrap it up. So Matt Jamieson, CEO of the Six Nations of the Grand River Corporation from Ontario, it’s been great to see your success. Thanks for sharing your story with us and we wish you all the best. So thanks. We’ll put the details of the website and everything.
Jackie Forrest:
Yes. Yeah. And there is some information about your governance structure there that people can check out to learn a little bit more.
Peter Tertzakian:
Great. Wonderful. Thank you.
Matt Jamieson:
Thank you, guys. Great talking to you.