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When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.

“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto,” Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.

Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws,” it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.

Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.

“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.

That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.

The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.

Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed.”

And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great , are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.

What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.

By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured,” read the majority decision.

Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.

“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired,” reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.

Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.

As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat.”

However, it was Eby himself who, as the NDP’s B.C. justice minister in 2021, shepherded through a little-known amendment specifying that B.C.’s adoption of UNDRIP was not merely symbolic.

It was a one-line change to the Interpretation Act, a longstanding piece of B.C. legislation which lays out the basics of how laws should be read and interpreted. The line Eby added was: “Every Act and regulation must be construed as being consistent with the Declaration.”

As one legal analysis wrote at the time , “whether these amendments will have unanticipated substantive regulatory or common law effects remains to be seen.”

The UNDRIP fiasco is entirely separate from another court-driven Indigenous rights bombshell that the Eby’s NDP government is actively trying to disavow.

In August, a B.C. Supreme Court decision ruled that a large block of privately owned land in Richmond, B.C., was now under the jurisdiction of Cowichan Tribes First Nation. The decision also struck down existing guarantees for private land titles in B.C., ruling that Aboriginal title took precedent.

IN OTHER NEWS

In a recent interview, a former federal immigration minister casually admitted to what might be one of the most effective dirty tricks in Canadian history. Sergio Marchi was immigration minister under prime minister Jean Chrétien at the time of Quebec’s 1995 separation referendum.

Speaking to the Journal de Montréal, Marchi said that Chrétien instructed his office to fast-track as many pending Quebec citizenship applications as possible, on the grounds that all the newly minted Canadians would probably vote “no” in the referendum.  As a result of “Opération citoyenneté” (Operation Citizenship) Marchi was likely able to create 11,500 new Canadians just in time for a referendum that ultimately hinged on only about 50,000 votes.

“Did it make a difference? Yes. Was it in Canada’s favour? Yes,” Marchi declared.

The outraged Bloc Québécois responded this month by pushing for a motion calling on the 91-year-old Chrétien to explain himself before the House of Commons committee on citizenship and immigration. But Chrétien said “no.”