FLETCHER: Eby’s DRIPA reform mess is pushing BC toward a land-claims showdown

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA – It appears we will have to wait until this fall to learn if British Columbia can find a way out of the latest effort to resolve the historic tangle of indigenous land claims and unfinished treaties across the province.Premier David Eby has been warned that his latest trio of watered-down treaties, two of which were tabled in the BC legislature in April, must be halted for 180 days or they will face challenges in the courts and on the highways due to overlapping claims. Eby has also backed down on his plan to amend the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), promising to spend the summer negotiating a solution acceptable to at least some of the 203 indigenous communities in the province.Eby’s voluntary “shared decision-making” plan, to effectively cede control over large areas of Crown land in secret negotiations outside of treaty talks, may also be stalled. Appeals of court decisions that threaten private property and the entire framework of provincial law are years away, as even American-based tribes begin to use DRIPA to assert their claims over BC mining projects.BC residents may wish that this effort to resolve the land claims across the province ends the way the last one did. It was in 2009 when former BC premier Gordon Campbell pulled back at the last minute on the Recognition and Reconciliation Act, which would have reconstituted BC’s unceded lands into 30 historic tribal areas. BC Conservative opponents, surging in public opinion polls even before they choose their next leader, have promised to repeal DRIPA on day one after defeating the NDP..The concept of “shared decision-making” goes back to 2006, when Campbell’s government signed a framework agreement for the “Great Bear Rainforest,” a faux-indigenous name for the vast region of the central and northern Pacific coast that was transferred to effective control of the group that came to be known as the Coastal First Nations.That’s a selected group of the many coastal communities set up by the David Suzuki Foundation with US support to form a barrier against Canadian oil exports. Shared decision-making in those days was not only with the Haida Nation and other anti-oil indigenous groups, but with Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and ForestEthics, now known as San Francisco-based Stand Earth.The north coast oil tanker loading ban remains today, thanks to Justin Trudeau, and US-backed environmental groups are still active in BC. A current court challenge to BC’s second natural gas pipeline to the north coast is being run by Ecojustice, formerly known as the Sierra Legal Defence Fund.The current crisis officially arrived with the election of an NDP government under John Horgan in 2017. He barely toppled the BC Liberal dynasty with the help of three BC Green Party members and a Fraser Valley MLA who defected to the NDP to become speaker..Horgan’s mandate letter for his first minister of indigenous relations and reconciliation instructed him to make the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples part of BC law. Then-attorney general Eby completed that task with a little-noticed change to the Interpretation Act, which the BC Court of Appeal has since ruled makes DRIPA the law of the land in the province.History, common sense, and the latest opinion poll suggest that Eby’s summer-long effort to settle this mess is not expected to succeed. It’s difficult to win when your opening move is to surrender, as Eby has done with the legal directive to abandon “extinguishment” of Aboriginal title as the Crown’s position in court.BC may survive this latest crisis, assuming DRIPA is repealed and the legitimacy of the Crown is restored. But that’s not likely to be achieved by an NDP government.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Eby’s DRIPA reform mess is pushing BC toward a land-claims showdown

Related Stories

Do U.S. tribes present a 'sovereignty threat' to British Columbia under DRIPA?

Greens eat Eby's lunch as Conservatives surge ahead in latest Angus Reid poll

Leaderless BC Conservatives open 10-point lead over NDP as DRIPA debate and Eby approval slide reshape political landscape

NDP veteran Joan Phillip ‘seriously ill’ after pivotal role in DRIPA reversal