The Canada Strong Fund needs Modern Treaty Nations as partners, not shareholders
On April 27, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund, a $25-billion federal sovereign wealth fund. The Department of Finance backgrounder places it alongside the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, EDC, and BDC. The Fund will invest alongside private capital in critical minerals, energy, transport, data infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing. Carney framed the Fund as making “all Canadians” beneficiaries of the financial returns these projects will generate.
The Assembly of First Nations responded the next day. AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak said the Spring Economic Update’s $37 billion in new investments contained no distinctions-based allocations for First Nations, and called for First Nations roles in the leadership of the new Crown corporation and on its Board of Directors. The Globe and Mail reported that Indigenous peoples were an afterthought in Canada’s economic strategy.
Six weeks of policy commentary have followed. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives argues the Fund is a derisking vehicle that routes its deals through the Building Canada Act's major-project stream, the same designation that lets projects bypass environmental assessment and Indigenous consultation, leaving it less effective than existing funds at reconciliation. McMillan LLP, walking proponents through the transaction implications, flags that the government will occupy the dual role of counterparty and investor. The same bulletin notes that Indigenous equity participation models will intersect with the Fund's capital in ways that require careful governance design. Policy Options has argued it is not a sovereign wealth fund at all, because Canada has no surplus to invest and runs a persistent current account deficit, but borrowing to finance domestic industrial policy, a large subsidy for national infrastructure built at home.
A simpler question has gone unasked. The Fund will invest mostly on Modern Treaty land, and the wealth it draws from that land is not the Crown's alone.
The categories for investment named in the announcement all run through Modern Treaty Nations. Take them one by one.
Critical minerals: Much of the priority geology for Canada’s critical mineral supply chain is in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon, and northern British Columbia. The Izok Lake and High Lake zinc-copper deposits sit on Inuit-owned land under the Nunavut Agreement. The Nico bismuth-cobalt project is on Tłı̨chǫ traditional territory, with the Tłı̨chǫ Government and Fortune Minerals forming a joint venture in 2026 to seek federal funding for the access road. Lithium and other critical mineral prospects in the NWT include sites on Tłı̨chǫ lands.
Energy: The Ksi Lisims LNG project on BC’s north coast is Nisga’a co-owned on Nisga’a Final Agreement lands. The Taltson Hydroelectric Expansion in the NWT sits in Akaitcho and Tłı̨chǫ territories. The Iqaluit Nukkiksautiit Hydroelectric Project, Inuit-owned under the Nunavut Agreement, is already in the Major Projects Office stream.
Transport and Arctic infrastructure: The Mackenzie Valley Highway runs through Sahtu, Gwich’in, and Dehcho territories, with SSI, the Gwich’in Tribal Council, and Pehdzéh Kı̨ First Nation advancing it together. The Grays Bay Road and Port project in Nunavut is led by West Kitikmeot Resources Corp., majority-owned by the Kitikmeot Inuit Association.
The geographic footprint of Modern Treaties is larger than the list of projects suggests. The Nunavut Agreement covers nearly 2 million square kilometres. The Inuvialuit Final Agreement, the Sahtu Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Tłı̨chǫ Agreement, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, the Nunavik Inuit Land Claims Agreement, the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement, the Nisga’a Final Agreement, the Maa-nulth Treaty, the Tsawwassen Final Agreement, and the eleven Yukon self-government and final agreements collectively cover roughly 80 percent of Canada’s North and significant portions of British Columbia. The K’ómoks Treaty received Royal Assent in BC on May 28, with Kitselas and Kitsumkalum expected this fall. The five Te’mexw treaties are in their final stage, with public engagement underway on southern Vancouver Island ahead of chief-negotiator initialling. Modern Treaties already cover more than 40 percent of Canada’s land mass, and that footprint is still growing with more than 70 Indigenous Nations in negotiations.
The Canada Strong Fund will be investing through Modern Treaty institutions, on Modern Treaty land, under Modern Treaty terms. The risk for Modern Treaty Nations is that the wealth generated from their constitutional rights gets converted into Crown returns one project at a time, with no mechanism to recognize the partnership the treaties already established. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs told the Globe and Mail that public funds deployed without free, prior, and informed consent violate Indigenous sovereignty, and “anything less is complicity.”
Modern Treaties produce returns at scale
Tsawwassen First Nation’s treaty took effect in 2009. Since then, the Nation has attracted more than $1 billion in private investment to Tsawwassen Lands, including roughly $750 million in commercial facilities and more than $200 million in industrial improvements. The province describes the development as the largest non-resource development on First Nations land in Canadian history. The completed commercial and industrial sites are projected to support more than 10,000 person-years of annual employment. Tsawwassen has around 491 members.
A 2025 Deloitte report prepared for the BC Treaty Commission projects net financial benefits of $1.17 billion to $1.93 billion in Net Present Value over the next decade across the Modern Treaties BC is expected to settle, depending on whether new settlements track the average of recent treaties or the report's “Most Recent Treaty Scenario,” which is benchmarked to the Kitselas settlement. Those numbers count cash compensation and resource revenue sharing only. They exclude land value, which the report explicitly leaves out because of measurement complexity. They also exclude the kind of broader economic activity Tsawwassen has demonstrated is possible. The same modelling shows the benefits roughly doubling if BC settles 12 treaties in the decade ahead instead of the projected 6.
The Indigenomics Institute reports that the Indigenous economy in Canada surpassed $100 billion in 2025.
Modern Treaties are generating these returns now. The Fund could be built on those returns by treating Modern Treaty Nations as partners in its structure, or run alongside them by treating those Nations as project-level participants while the sovereign-wealth ledger sits on the Crown's side. The federal government has signalled the second.
The Crown’s working theory of Indigenous economic participation is that Indigenous Nations get project-level equity through the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, which the federal government doubled from $5 billion to $10 billion last year and is now expanding into infrastructure and trade. The federal government holds sovereign wealth through the Fund. The same lands generate returns in both channels, but the scale is not comparable. ILGP gives a Nation a single project's worth of equity, capped at the deal and paid back over that project's life. The Fund captures returns across the entire federal pipeline, on a generational time horizon, and reinvests them on behalf of “all Canadians.” One channel is project-scale and time-limited. The other is portfolio-scale and permanent.
Inside the Fund, not outside it
Modern Treaty Nations should not just be the recipients of investment at the project level. They should be partners in the governance of the Fund and beneficiaries of the returns the Fund generates, on the same side of the ledger as the Crown. That is what their constitutional position as wealth-generators on these lands requires, and it is not what the federal government has put on the table.
The Crown’s theory assumes the underlying land is a federal asset. On most of the territory the Fund’s investment categories occupy, that is not the legal position. Modern Treaties define ownership, resource rights, law-making authority, and revenue-sharing as constitutional rights of the Nation. Any investment the Fund makes on Modern Treaty land has to respect the Nation’s ownership of treaty settlement lands, secure its consent on resource development, defer to its laws where its law-making authority applies, and pay its share of resource revenues under the treaty’s revenue-sharing provisions.
AFN has called for First Nations representation in leadership and on the Board of the new Crown corporation. The Modern Treaty version of that ask is structural: each Modern Treaty Nation is a government with its own elected leadership and constitutional jurisdiction, and a Fund that recognized that constitutional position would give Modern Treaty governments a direct seat in its leadership and rules-design. The federal government has given Modern Treaty Nations no board seat, no role in designing the Fund’s rules, and no claim on its returns.
Modern Treaty fiscal financing arrangements and resource revenue-sharing provisions are constitutional commitments. The Fund will generate returns from assets to which Modern Treaty Nations hold ownership and revenue-sharing rights. Whether a portion of the Fund’s returns should flow back into Modern Treaty fiscal arrangements is the structural question the federal government has not raised.
The Department of Finance has said details will be worked through in the months ahead, and what it has signalled so far slots Indigenous participation in at the project level, alongside ILGP. The structural question is whether Modern Treaty Nations sit on the same side of the ledger as the Crown when sovereign wealth is built on Modern Treaty land.
Modern Treaties produce certainty, and certainty has economic value. Modern Treaty Nations must be partners and investors in the Canada Strong Fund, not simply shareholders entitled to a dividend.
