Has anybody stopped to look at how much of British Columbia is being turned over to some form of indigenous ownership or control, how much more is contemplated and then asked two simple questions: where does this stop and when did the voters ever have a chance to say what they thought of it?.Tonight, the Western Standard’s BC reporter Alex Zoltan joins Hannaford show host Nigel Hannaford to talk about the latest government handover. He describes how three sites in downtown Victoria – parking lots and waterfront parcels valued at tens of millions of dollars – are to be transferred in fee-simple, to the Songhees First Nation.The historic Hatley Park property – once Canada’s naval college, later Royal Roads University – is also on the table. Land inside Discovery Island Marine Provincial Park is included..Once transferred, municipal bylaws will not apply and public access is not guaranteed. Indeed, the treaties are described as “living agreements,” capable of further expansion and according to government sources, “may take some getting used to…” whatever that may turn out to mean. One parcel overlooks the scenic Inner Harbour. Another is immediately across the street west of the Legislature.Are there limits to what the new owners could do with these lands?Zoltan: “They would have so much autonomy over the area that it's not even guaranteed there would be public access.”.Governments are doing something that while not secret, has also not been explained to the public or ever made an election issue. The Government of BC – and latterly the courts – are giving the province to indigenous peoples, one piece at a time.In Richmond, the August 2025 decision in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada declared Aboriginal title over roughly 300 hectares of land that includes privately held fee-simple properties. That doesn’t sound like much, and the result will be appealed.But that a court would even find Crown grants of those titles were defective and invalid in the first place – an unprecedented finding that aboriginal title can sit as a senior interest over private land in a modern Canadian city – has enormous implications for property owners all over the province..Meanwhile, last year the BC Supreme Court formally recognized the Haida Nation’s “collective aboriginal title” to Haida Gwaii to the entire archipelago through a historic consent order. Aboriginal title is a distinct, constitutionally protected indigenous form of collective ownership and jurisdiction, unrelated to fee-simple private property. Of course, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) is only one per cent of BC’s land area…But you see, there’s more. A lot more. So-called Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas – IPCAs – continue to expand with federal and provincial support. This is something relatively new, in which large areas are set aside for ‘conservation,’ with the intention of placing them under indigenous control. Large northern territories are thus claimed by (for example) the Tahltan people, then layered with new conservation designations that effectively hand stewardship and development control to an indigenous government. The Tahltan proposal is in an advanced stage of planning. The nearby Dene have grander ambitions yet; together if fully realised, they represent another five per cent of the province. And there are other similar proposals.And so it goes on. The question is, where will it stop?.All of this is consistent with BC’s 2019 DRIPA legislation that requires every provincial statute to align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The federal government pushes the same direction through its 30-by-30 conservation targets and funding for other indigenous-led protected areas.So the question can no longer be avoided: What is the actual policy here, and who wrote it?Is this a carefully considered process of reconciliation and modern treaty-making? Or is it a quiet, multi-level transfer of public land, urban real estate, and resource authority to a small fraction of the population, driven by court decisions, United Nations language, and governments driven by who knows what motive that they don’t care to test at the ballot box?Are we, in practice, handing over significant parts of Canada to indigenous people, not through open democratic debate, but through an undeclared policy to use judicial rulings, aspirational international declarations turned into domestic law, and political decisions that treat public ownership as temporary?It looks that way. Ottawa – and BC – need to come clean with the Canadian people. Because this isn’t just going on in BC.The details matter. The direction matters more.In this episode of Hannaford, watch Alex Zoltan talks about the Victoria land transfers and discuss the larger pattern.The Hannaford Show is uploaded at 7 o’clock.
