Our Approach

Retaining skilled negotiators may be more important to advancing First Nation interests than skilled litigators, as typically the biggest wins in Court, while producing huge leverage in negotiations, do lead to yet more negotiations. Our firm’s approach to negotiations is both interest and intelligence-based.

Interest-based in that we seek to understand the core of every First Nation’s true interests, and secure them as part of a negotiation process, rather than simply engaging in positional negotiations that often turn into merely a trading of numbers where there is always a starting floor and ceiling, leading it to be impossible to break through that preexisting ceiling using a purely positional strategy.

Intelligence-based in that we seek to amass both in advance of the start of negotiations and through probing for relevant information during the negotiations, the facts needed to secure the optimal negotiation outcome for every First Nation client. Position negotiations are merely a linear two-dimensional process, with each side attempting to push the other more one way or the other. Interest and intelligence-based negotiations operating in all dimensions, breaking the strictures of pushing mere numbers up or down, to consider and secure all advantages that can be secured for a First Nation in every respect, far beyond mere numbers.

Among the types of negotations with assist First Nations with include:

• Business & Commercial Contracts - Partnerships, Joint-Venture Agreements, Leases or Sales of Land.

• Consultations & Accommodation - involving all types of land and resource development.

• Impact Benefit Agreements - involving negotiations with proponents leading wherever possible to true partnerships involving respectful relationships.

• Specific and Special Claims - involving breaches of Crown obligations to First Nations.

• Treaty Negotiations - involving full implementation of constitutionally protected Treaty Rights.

The Negotiators

Gordon S. Campbell, B.A., LL.B., B.C.L, leads the First Nations Advocates negotiations practice. He has served as lead negotiator on numerous Indigenous Title, Treaty and Rights Claims in Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia and Atlantic Canada, including what was then the highest value Specific Claims settlement in Manitoba or Ontario history. He also helped establish the Specific Claims Tribunal of Canada.