Indigenous Partnerships

In my work at a provincial Crown corporation, Indigenous communities are among the partners on the other side of the table when land is identified and housing is structured. Those partnerships work when they involve real decision-making authority and real capital, and they stall when they are consultation exercises attached to a decision already made.

Indigenous-led housing and development corporations in this corridor have demonstrated capacity. The constraint is usually the province’s ability to move at the speed of a real partner, not theirs.

I am conscious that a non-Indigenous candidate writing a reconciliation page is at constant risk of speaking for people who have not asked him to. So this page is deliberately narrow: it describes what I have done, what I have observed, and what I would commit to, and it does not characterise anyone else’s position.

I have not yet sat down with the Squamish and Líl’wat Nations about any of this, and I will not pretend otherwise. What is here will change once I have, and it should.

This is the part candidates usually skip, so I will not.

British Columbia is unusual in Canada: outside the Douglas Treaties on parts of Vancouver Island and Treaty 8 in the northeast, most of this province was settled without treaties ever being negotiated. Successive governments left those questions unresolved, and they ended up being answered in court instead. The courts have a constitutional role and I am not criticising them for doing their job. But a province that resolves its foundational questions through litigation gets uncertainty as a by-product, for Nations, for local governments, for workers, and for anyone trying to finance a project. I see the downstream version of that uncertainty in my own work: it is one of the reasons good housing projects stall.

CentreBC’s position, which I share, is that the answer is to finish the work rather than relitigate it. Modern treaties have already shown that negotiated agreements can provide stability and clarity, strengthen Indigenous communities, and give everyone else something to plan against.

On DRIPA specifically, the party has been clear that promising repeal is political messaging rather than a practical solution; much of what followed DRIPA came through later legislation, so repealing it would not undo those changes, and it would not address a single one of the underlying problems. I agree with that. I would rather spend the time negotiating durable agreements than staging a fight that changes nothing on the ground.

What that means in practice is a single provincial framework so negotiating mandates, funding and timelines stop being scattered across ministries and Crown agencies; bringing affected parties into the room early, before positions harden; clear and transparent timelines for major projects; practical sector agreements in areas like forestry, housing and infrastructure; and measuring outcomes rather than process.

I will not pretend any of this is simple, and you should be wary of anyone who does. But complexity is an argument for better leadership, not for leaving it another thirty years.

Provincial capacity to move at partnership speed: dedicated staff and pre-development capital for Indigenous-led housing and development projects.

Co-developed corridor land and water management, particularly for the biosphere region work.

Procurement and economic development pathways that include Indigenous-owned businesses in the corridor economy as a matter of course.