Conservative critic says NDP strongholds will decide DRIPA petition

PENTICTON - Official opposition Indigenous Relations critic Scott McInnis says Harman Bhangu’s newly approved citizen-initiative petition to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act will live or die in BC NDP stronghold ridings.The Columbia River-Revelstoke MLA told Western Standard on Friday he has not run a riding-by-riding numbers dive — but the pattern, he said, is already obvious.“Any strongly held NDP ridings, or especially any NDP ridings that are maybe more remote, may be difficult,” McInnis said.Bhangu, the Langley-Abbotsford MLA and transportation critic, won in-principle approval from Elections BC on Thursday for a two-sentence draft bill that would repeal DRIPA on royal assent. The petition is to be issued October 26. Signature sheets are due January 25, 2027. Canvassers must collect valid names from 10% of registered voters in each of the 93 electoral districts. A miss in one district kills the entire drive..McInnis put the per-riding ask at “let’s say 3,500.” That number checks out as a rough average. In his own riding, the threshold for success would be around 3,140 names of 31,366 registered voters. The same 10% test runs from under 1,500 in the smallest northern districts to well over 5,000 in the largest urban ones..“It can’t just be the MLAs,” McInnis said. “Anybody who strongly believes, like we do, that this is a flawed piece of legislation that has, in many respects, [been] responsible for the slowdown of our economy."He wants riding associations, volunteers and people who have “changed their view and their mind about DRIPA over the last, let’s say, two or three years” on the sheets.“If everybody can do their part, get their friends and their family, their network, their little communities to chip in and support this, I think it’s achievable,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult.”Hours before the interview he quote-tweeted Bhangu’s announcement..McInnis is “proud of Harman for doing it” and offered “100%, 150% support.” He said he will help around the province.A repeal, he said, would not retire the problems DRIPA was advertised as the potential solution for.“We hear the premier and the attorney general and the NDP in general saying this was designed to keep us out of court,” McInnis said. “I just think that’s just completely and utterly false… not being truthful to the public about that.”He pointed to the BC Court of Appeal’s December 2025 reasons on the mineral-claims regime, which treated DRIPA as having immediate legal force and held provincial laws have to align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples..When asked what the BC Conservatives had in mind as an alternative to DRIPA, McInnis was noncommittal. He would not offer a Conservative replacement program, as he said the policy is still being built with the party and the caucus, and also, he does not intend to hand the NDP a ready-made off-ramp.What he would put on the record is a promise for the BC Conservatives to take a different approach than the NDP in specific areas. He promised to be “overly transparent,” to hold public sessions on reconciliation, to keep “our economy at the forefront” as “the northern star,” and to chase “a greater goal towards certainty on the land base.” He said that work should be guided by “legal experts in the field who know this space very well, not people who are ideologically driven.”Interestingly, First Nations are not a bloc on the petition or the statute, he said. He talks to chiefs and councils weekly. Some tell him DRIPA “doesn’t affect me” or that it is “too political.”McInnis pointed to aboriginal-law lawyer Tom Isaac, the Cassels chair and a former provincial treaty negotiator, who has described British Columbia’s current model as “first-past-the-post reconciliation.” In Isaac’s telling, a short list of nations get a seat at the table and the rest do not. McInnis put the favoured group at “two dozen.”“That is certainly not the approach we’re going to take,” he said. “We will sit down and talk to any nation that wants to see prosperity for their youth,” and to nations that want to deal with the overrepresentation of their members in the criminal justice system and of their children in government care..He called those files “social, low-hanging fruit that everybody can get behind.” The government’s miss, he said, is on “doing things for human beings.”“I see a tremendous opportunity to actually see measurable results for individuals and communities by addressing some of these issues.”A May Angus Reid Institute poll found 47% of British Columbians favoured repeal, including 26% of those who voted NDP in 2024. Thirty-three percent were opposed and 21% were unsure.A verified petition still does not repeal the statute. The House can amend, delay or defeat whatever follows.The Western Standard gave McInnis the opportunity to share what he thought the BC NDP was actually succeeding on related to the indigenous file.“I always like to give credit where credit is due. But that’s a really tough one,” he said. He listed the tests he applies — standing up for private property, transparency, keeping the economy at the front of the conversation, fairness for indigenous communities across British Columbia — and stopped. “I'll have to get back to you on that one.”

Conservative critic says NDP strongholds will decide DRIPA petition

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