JORDAN BATEMAN
It tells the Premier to stay the course on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, and calls anyone raising concerns a fear-monger spreading “anti-Indigenous rhetoric,” and promises that everything in B.C. is hunky dory – just trust the process.
Before you accept that framing, take a closer look at the names who signed it.
You’ve got big labour bosses, a flock of UBC and Osgoode law professors, foreign-funded Stand.earth, the David Suzuki Foundation, Amnesty International, Green politicians, and a handful of obscure city councillors. It’s a who’s-who of people whose paycheques don’t depend on a construction permit being issued, a mineral claim being respected, or a land title meaning what it says on paper.
Now search the list and try to find the private sector employers. Find someone who signs the front of a cheque, not the back. Find an entrepreneur, a shop owner, a trades contractor – anyone who had to commit their own dollar to their business’ success.
Those people didn’t sign the letter, and that’s no accident.
The letter claims DRIPA delivers “certainty and predictable processes” and “economic growth.” That’s a nice theory, but here’s what’s happened in the real world. The Gitxaała ruling – driven by Section 8.1 of the Interpretation Act, which requires courts to read every B.C. statute through the lens of a United Nations declaration that was meant to be symbolic, not legislated – blew up the province’s mineral tenure system and left the mining and exploration sector frozen.
And that was on top of the Cowichan decision on fee simple title – leaving the City of Richmond sending letters to roughly 150 landowners warning them their titles might be compromised and their properties possibly unsaleable. A lender pulled a $35 million construction loan, and prospective tenants vanished. Construction on a light industrial park has ground to a halt, costing everyday workers their jobs.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re precisely what the activists want.
The signatories will tell you those are just scare stories, but Premier Eby himself, the guy who championed the flawed DRIPA and wrote the implementation guidelines as Attorney General, stood up at the Natural Resources Forum in January and said the courts have gone further than the legislature ever intended. When the law’s own champion says it’s been stretched beyond what anyone contemplated, maybe it’s time to stop calling everyone else fearmongers.
The real question is narrower and more legitimate than the letter’s authors want to admit: should a provincial law – passed with a grand total of 14 minutes of democratic debate about what it would actually do – give courts a blank cheque to remake B.C.’s entire governance framework, with no defined limits and no democratic accountability? That’s a fair question. Smearing it as fearmongering is a way of dodging it.
Here’s what B.C. actually needs to do.
- Repeal DRIPA, don’t amend it. Section 35 of the Constitution already protects Aboriginal rights and title. The duty to consult is well-established law. B.C. doesn’t need a provincial statute pointing courts at a UN General Assembly resolution with no guardrails.
- Repeal Section 8.1 of the Interpretation Act, which requires all BC to conform with the UN declaration and turned the Gitxaała case into a wrecking ball for the resource sector.
- Protect private property rights – legislatively and clearly, so that a letter from your City Hall one day isn’t the thing telling you your home is not really yours.
- Invest serious political will in the treaty process, where negotiated outcomes produce durable legal certainty for everyone, including the Indigenous communities that want economic partnerships and have every right to pursue them.
The activists want this to be a binary choice: DRIPA as written, or you’re anti-Indigenous. That’s cynical, false, and anti-democratic.
Here’s the real choice: Premier Eby can take advice from activists whose livelihood is completely insulated from the consequences of getting this wrong, or he can listen to the Richmond homeowner who heard from City Hall that the house she’s lived in for 30 years might not actually be hers.
One of those people signed the letter. The other one didn’t.
Jordan Bateman is VP-Communications at the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA), Canada’s largest construction association.
