Karen Restoule, writing for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is arguing for a version of reconciliation that starts with revenue instead of another federal program. Remembering residential schools and other harms still matters to her. Her own family lived with that history. She does not think memory, by itself, changes the conditions her grandchildren will inherit. What changes those conditions is a community that can pay for its own language work, health services and housing because it owns something that earns money.
Ottawa already spends about $38 billion a year through Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations. Restoule does not pretend that money does nothing. She argues that a system built on transfers keeps a large bureaucracy in business and leaves the same gaps in place. The alternative is already visible. The Indigenous Energy Monitor counted 546 Indigenous-owned projects in 2026, held by 442 owners and valued at about $283 billion. In 2016 the Assembly of First Nations said only about a third of 634 First Nations were involved in resource development. Majority Indigenous-owned businesses grew 42.7 percent between 2005 and 2021, and estimates now put the number of Indigenous businesses above 60,000.
The examples she uses are concrete. Fort McKay First Nation built a service group in the oil sands that brings in more than $150 million a year from supply contracts, then partnered with Mikisew Cree in 2017 to buy a 49 percent stake in Suncor’s East Tank Farm for $503 million. More than half of the nation’s revenue now comes from businesses it owns. Dokis First Nation has stayed with fur, logging, tourism and power generation and kept a stronger local economy than a transfer model would have produced. Restoule wants chiefs and councils to have peer mentoring on deals, capital and markets, and she wants companies building mines and pipelines required to negotiate real benefit-sharing. She also wants governments to stop treating a regulatory delay as a moral achievement.
Her Ojibwe frame for this is mino-bimaadziwin, a good life that includes healthy families, land and self-determination, not a slogan on a press release. Money does not erase old wounds. It does let a nation fund the things it says it cares about without waiting for the next federal envelope. A reconciliation policy that keeps measuring success by how much Ottawa sends, rather than by what communities earn, will keep producing the same reports ten years from now.
