B.C. First Nation asks UN body to count cultural losses in spill compensation formula

Chief Marilyn Slett speaks during a news conference in Vancouver, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns

An international group that sets the compensation formula for maritime oil spills doesn’t factor in the devastating cultural losses to First Nations, says an Indigenous leader whose Coastal B.C. nation has experienced a disastrous fuel spill.

Marilyn Slett, the elected chief of the Heiltsuk Nation on British Columbia’s central coast, will be in London on Tuesday to address the International Maritime Organization, an agency within the United Nations.

The body sets global standards for the safety, security and environmental performance of international shipping, and Slett said she will be asking the organization’s legal committee to include Indigenous cultural losses.

Almost a decade ago, the tug Nathan E. Stewart, hauling a tank barge ran aground about 10 nautical miles west of Bella Bella, B.C., in Heiltsuk territory.

The hull of the tug breached, releasing about 110,000 litres of diesel into the environment.

Slett said they are still waiting for compensation and restoration work to begin, with over $23 million in estimated recovery costs.

The spill shows maritime laws covering oil spills were made without considering Indigenous Peoples and without a mechanism for compensating them for their cultural losses, she said.

“So, it goes really to the fabric of our way of life,” she said in an interview. “We are deeply connected to our territory. Our culture comes alive in our lands and in our waters, and this spill took that away, and will never be the same again.”

Rick Steiner, an environmental consultant, applauded Slett’s push, calling the IMO’s oil spill regime “terribly inadequate.”

“The IMO has been captured by commercial shipping industries for decades, and they’ve been a very difficult organization to move forward on environmental and certainly on cultural issues,” he said in an interview on Monday.

He said the issue of compensation for environmental destruction has been flagged by experts like him for decades.

“The problem is that the vast majority of losses and damages from oil spills simply cannot be reinstated or fixed environmentally,” said Steiner, a former marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska who provided leadership in the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Steiner said the system is a “sweetheart multi-billion dollar liability shelter” for oil companies that cause spills and he’s calling for an overhaul of the regime.

He said the “nut of the issue” is that the compensation plan only recognizes commercial losses.

Steiner said the importance of imposing adequate financial liability for oil spills is twofold.

“One is to justly compensate victims, including the sort of cultural claims that Chief Slett is talking about, fully recognizing though that after a major spill, there is really little that money can do to compensate the amazing amount of damage caused,” he said.

“You can’t rebuild injured marine ecosystems or injured human communities but you have to compensate for them in some way, financially.”

The second reason, he said, is “for the necessity of adequate financial liabilities to provide an incentive for oil companies and shippers to conduct their business as safely as possible.”

Slett, who will be in the United Kingdom from April 13 to 17, will also speak to Canada’s High Commissioner in the United Kingdom, former federal Liberal cabinet minister Bill Blair.

She says the delegates will be pointing to Canada’s status as a signatory of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and its membership on the IMO, as reasons for supporting their advocacy.

The IMO’s legal committee has representatives from all 176 states that are full members of the organization, including Canada.

This will be Slett’s second trip to London to lobby for change. She said she went there two years ago and met with some of the member countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.

Her trip also comes about three months after she and other coastal First Nations leaders met with Prime Minister Mark Carney to reiterate their opposition to a memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and Alberta signed last fall over the construction of another oil pipeline to B.C.’s coast.

Carney has said that the pipeline will not happen without a private proponent.

Any future pipeline would also require changes to the federal tanker ban which prohibits oil tankers carrying more than 12,500 metric tons of crude as cargo along B.C.’s northern coast.

— with files from Brieanna Charlebois in Vancouver

This report by Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press, was first published April 13, 2026.