Geoff Russ: Repealing DRIPA is only the first step to fixing Eby's reconciliation overreach - National Post

David Eby speaks at the First Nations Leaders’ Gathering in Vancouver, B.C. on Tuesday, Jan 22, 2025. Photo by B.C. GovernmentArticle contentDoes the question of reconciliation loom large over British Columbia’s ongoing provincial election?

In public polling, it does not rank as highly as economic issues such as the cost of living or public safety. But the effects of legislation such as the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), along with questions surrounding private property, have not disappeared.

The B.C. Conservatives have pledged to repeal DRIPA if they form government, but that would be the easy, low-hanging fruit.

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Accompanying DRIPA has been a concerted effort to fund narratives that favour the legislation and related policies. In effect, the NDP, aided by the federal Liberals, has been paying to create the social licence for altering the status of private property, land use and the economy itself in B.C.

For example, Canadian Heritage has given $230,000 in funding to a travelling Nanaimo Museum exhibit about historic railway land grants, specifically framed around their “colonial” effects. The so-called “Great Land Grab” project was intended to portray today’s forestry and private land ownership on Vancouver Island as part of the legacy of those grants.

No one is questioning historical inquiry, but using public money to draw a line from “colonial land policies” to today’s private landowners and business operators amounts to a political campaign that will have consequences.

The ongoing effort to completely reshape the provincially run Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria is another example, with new displays that frame B.C.’s historic resource industries and colonial development as ecological, moral and economic disasters for Indigenous Peoples and the environment.

That is one interpretation, a highly charged one that relegates First Nations to the role of passive victims rather than recognizing the active participants they often were in colonial history. It recasts them as something resembling an absurdly Avatar-style resistance movement.

In any case, the NDP’s solution to remedy these alleged wrongs is to assert more power over the economy, which is still built on private land and resource extraction.

Decisions by the courts have only compounded these developments.

The judiciary, which is not accountable to the public in the same way elected governments are, has handed down consequential decisions such as the B.C. Supreme Court ruling in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada. It recognized Aboriginal title over a swathe of land in Richmond, including privately owned land. For the record, private land ownership is also excoriated by the Royal B.C. Museum through its colonial land office display, which depicts the system that parcelled out land in the province.

That same judiciary has already rejected one property owner’s attempt to reopen the case, finding that the owner had prior knowledge of the claim and warning that reopening it could invite a flood of similar applications. These decisions are very favourable to B.C.’s NDP government, whose DRIPA legislation provides mechanisms for expanding Indigenous participation in decisions affecting private property and private-sector industry.