Beaten at their own game, provincial and federal cabinet ministers reacted to the Tsilhqot’in Supreme Court of Canada decision last week with statements so vapid and disingenuous that I have to wonder if they have learned anything thing from this exercise.
On June 26, the Supreme Court recognized the Tsilhqot’in’s aboriginal title over 1,750 square kilometres of land southwest of Williams Lake. It was the first time the highest court in the land had done so.
B.C. Attorney General Suzanne Anton’s official reaction was almost upbeat: “The decision provides additional certainty around processes and tests that are applied to the relationship between the province and aboriginal peoples.”
One could be forgiven for forgetting for a moment that her government had just been badly trounced by a small but feisty group of First Nations.
But it was federal Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt’s response that took the cake for its insincerity.
“We are committed to continuing this progress and ensuring an effective process for negotiating treaties,” he said in press release.
Really? Committed to ensuring progress for negotiating treaties?
According to Tsilhqot’in Chief Joe Alphonse, it was largely the intransigence of the federal government and Taseko Mines – which wants to build a mine in Tsilhqot’in territory – that propelled this issue all the way to the highest court in the land, at no small expense.
And he’s not the only one with an intimate knowledge of First Nations relations with Ottawa to lay most of the blame for lack of progress at the feet of the federal government.
“The main obstacle to progress at many treaty tables over the last half a dozen years has been federal intransigence on some key policy issues – usually fisheries,” said Geoff Plant, the former B.C. Attorney General and Treaty Minister.
BC Treaty Commissioner Sophie Pierre echoes that sentiment. Although all three parties can sometimes be blamed for intransigence on certain issues, it is largely the federal government’s lack of commitment to the treaty process that has bogged it down so badly that it has nearly ground to a halt on one or two occasions.
I’ve seen it myself. I covered treaty negotiations for about five years when I lived on Vancouver Island, and the bureaucracy that came out of Ottawa could be maddening at times.
The Tsilhqot'in case started as a dispute between the small First Nation – a group of six bands – and the B.C. government over logging in the 1980s.
But a funny thing happened on the way to court: Former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell – who tried to kill the treaty process with a referendum on the issue – surprised everyone when he apparently saw the light and changed the government’s attitude toward dealing with First Nations in B.C.
One needed only to look at some of the other Supreme Court decisions preceding Tsilhqot'in – Calder, Sparrow, Delgamuukw, Haida – to see the writing on the wall: Let native land claims be settled through the courts, and First Nations would continue to win, but in the most acrimonious way possible. Campbell got it – Ottawa, apparently, did not.
The B.C. government, to its credit, has shown a willingness to remove some of the roadblocks to progress by implementing things like interim agreements, which allow for mutually beneficial economic activities to be carried on while land claims make their glacial way through the courts or treaty negotiations.
The federal government has been less keen to resolve native land claims through treaty negotiations. According to Sophie Pierre, every time an agreement is reached, it is sent to Ottawa, where various departments – Fisheries, Justice, Health, Revenue Canada – pick it apart and send back something that looks like another broken promise.
“They unravel the whole thing,” Pierre told me in an interview last year. “Why weren’t they at the table involved all the way along?”
It’s a good question.
The Stephen Harper government clearly supports finding a new route for Alberta oil to get to export markets, and a pipeline through B.C. is one of the most direct routes.
But there are a lot of First Nations along that corridor with unresolved land claims, and they've just been handed a wild card.
