A reckoning for 'Reconciliation Incorporated'

British Columbia has a land problem, a DRIPA problem, and a market over-correction problem. Without timely push-back, it could quickly become Canada's next great self-inflicted wound.

Joffre Lakes Provincial Park in British Columbia, a now frequent site of on-again, off-again closures to the public, after a closed-door agreement struck between the province and First Nations.

After meeting with dozens of concerned groups, campaigners, political and business leaders, cancelled educators, and land-owners in Vancouver last week, I come bearing words of warning from the left coast.

We may well have been lucky enough to grow up in the halcyon days of working services, jobs and pathways to prosperity for our young, and flags and statues not toppled on a whim, but add public land use to the issues you never anticipated having with Canada.

Like many residents of this at-times lunatic fringe, I first learned of this issue from Caroline Elliott, professor and hiking mom extraordinaire, who began making global headlines with walk-and-talks in the brush, highlighting the rapidly-decreased access to crown lands being drawn up and agreed to behind closed doors, and without democratic consent.

As a director of the Public Land Use Society, formed in response to this growing concern, Elliott and her PLUS team have taken it upon themselves to better educate and represent concerned citizens, who are waking up late to a flagrant market over-correction for some of the despicable institutional lies sold in 2021.

Will the damage ever be undone?

The issues at present are obvious.

As witnessed with other industrial complexes that sprung up after Covid, during those cursed, mass psychoses-addled summers, when you give new-found, billion-dollar business interests an inch — and oodles of federal funding — they’ll take miles.

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome,” as the old business adage goes.

Ask the towns and cities rapidly transformed by fake schools and the Temporary Foreign Worker explosion, or the parents of recent grads with 2000 applications under their belt with not a job to show for it, how hard it is to undo immigration’s very own market over-correction.

There are paths to walk to reconciliation that don’t involve secretive, exclusionary, and undemocratic interpretations of UNDRIP and DRIPA; UNDRIP being the deeply flawed United Nations’ dictate of the de-colonial variety, and DRIPA its British Columbia action plan. (In 2021, Canada passed its very own federal version.)

DRIPA can only be considered the law of the land if the general public is too cowardly to push back with a simple, “Woah, what the hell. I never voted for this.”

Almost overnight, sweeping land use agreements have been struck behind closed doors, and news-dumped on long weekends to avoid public scrutiny.

Lakes, provincial parks, docks, major swathes of crown land — all, apparently, may now be bequeathed to those who held claim second last. It’s a bomb-and-gouge project of such thoughtlessness, that it’s only rivalled by some of the Indigenous land development deals that are leading to hand-waved, 11-tower, monolithic, view-destroying super projects, that ignore existing infrastructure, decades of thoughtful precedent, and the consultation of any local opposition.

Wherever you may be reading this from, you may not presently find the land being undercut from beneath your feet without a vote, or find yourself suddenly being denied dock access unless you grease the palms of a band you don’t recall electing in the first place, but an important reminder: all but 95% of British Columbia is crown land.

And 89% of Canada is considered crown land.

If it can happen here, it can happen in a place like Ontario — Canada’s imagined centre of the universe — where millions north of Toronto live on property that abuts public lands they thought were free and clear.

All it takes is the wrong political animals and premier, the right community cowardice, and here’s the new Covid-mandate debacle, or mass-immigration rug-pull.

Look no further than the mess that is Indigenous title change in Haida Gwai, where 50% of residents aren’t Haida to begin with, and who now live on land they thought they paid to have claim over, as well as for proximity access to shared lands for all — because, like it or not, that’s how land is supposed to work.

In a game of chicken between who had it second last, and last, the latter cannot afford to blink.

We already have two generations turning their gaze south, and proclaiming no allegiance to anything but the opportunity to actually own a home and make something of themselves — and understandably so.

Undercut them further, by ignoring the clear need for more-thoughtful collaboration with Indigenous groups and more long-term planning, and that festering limb falls off.

Much like a decade of economic stagnation, and the rest of the laundry-list of polices of managed decline, Canada’s far-left government experiment in decolonial Kabuki Theatre has failed the public, and will fail its future.

When even the most lily-livered among us are unboxing statues and flying flags recently bought on Temu, this is a moment for pressure, for political ridicule, to push for true partnerships between the aggrieved of the past, and the aggrieved of the present.

But no more protected classes. No more picking winners and losers.

As sure as the land once was beneath your feet, Reconciliation Incorporated now poses a real threat to any semblance of common-sense pseudo-recovery.

I encourage to you learn more about the Public Land Use Society, and ready yourself for the political battles to come.

Alexander Brown is a writer, campaigner, and non-profit director. Of late, his work has appeared in The Hub, the Toronto Sun, the Western Standard, and on Toronto Today with Greg Brady.