Jim Prentice speaks to the Assembly of First Nations assembly in Whitehorse

A former Conservative cabinet minister told delegates to the Assembly of First Nations assembly in Whitehorse that there are “incredible opportunities” in the energy and natural resource sectors and First Nations should negotiate to become a part of them before they get left behind. Jim Prentice, a former Aboriginal Affairs minister in the Stephen Harper government, told the gathering these are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, but they won’t be around forever. “They will need to seize that opportunity and use the so-called duty-to-consult to really negotiate economic participation in some of the resource projects that are happening across Canada,” he told The Canadian Press. “These are incredible opportunities. They don’t come along necessarily very often, and so I think there’s a historic opportunity, I think, over the next 25 years for First Nations to benefit from these opportunities if they negotiate to their advantage.”