Prime Minister Mark Carney used Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to frame reconciliation as both remembrance and policy direction, underscoring Indigenous equity and co-ownership as priorities for how the country builds future projects.
In a statement from Ottawa on Tuesday, Carney said the day honors Survivors and the children who never returned from residential schools while acknowledging the system’s lasting harms.
“Reconciliation is a generational task,” Carney said in a statement, adding that the federal government will pair remembrance with responsibility.
Carney reiterated commitments already underway, including support for communities that are searching former school sites for unmarked graves, advancing the Calls for Justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and implementing Canada’s legislation based on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
He also stressed that partnership must be built on self-determination and economic opportunity. The prime minister’s office framed those aims as core to the work of health care, housing, education, and prosperity for Indigenous peoples.
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Ottawa has launched a Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee program that provides up to C$5 billion in federal guarantees to help Indigenous communities secure competitively priced financing for stakes in natural resource and energy projects.
The program is designed to lower borrowing costs and broaden access to capital, which in turn can make ownership structures more durable over the life of an asset and better align the interests of project partners and host communities.
The federal government wants more deals structured with meaningful Indigenous ownership and revenue-sharing that can influence everything from project feasibility to the cost of capital.
Equity partnerships can improve the predictability of permitting and consultation by moving Indigenous rights holders from stakeholder to owner, which tends to reduce certain social risks that lenders and investors price into financing.
It also creates a framework for ongoing community benefits, which can be critical through commodity cycles and policy shifts.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were separated from their families, languages, and cultures through the residential school system, and more than 6,600 first-hand accounts were recorded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Those numbers, repeated by Carney, have shaped a broad federal agenda that seeks to move beyond symbolic gestures toward shared decision-making and ownership.
Federal support that improves financing for Indigenous partners can help fill gaps that have stalled deals in the past, particularly where communities sought sizable equity positions but faced higher borrowing costs.
Carney closed by linking remembrance to the future. “We pledge to build a future where Survivors are honored with remembrance, with justice, and with a stronger Canada,” he said.
