In the space of a week, the B.C. government has managed to undermine the most comprehensive route for settling the land question in the province – a process that took 120 years to launch.
One could not choose a more perilous time to surprise the two other key players in the treaty process – the federal government and First Nations – with an ill-defined plan to try something new: All three parties have been carefully working out where they stand in the wake of last summer's landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision on aboriginal rights and title.
There was consensus that the negotiation framework conducted through the B.C. Treaty Commission was in need of reform. There was support in some quarters for the notion of phasing it out in favour of a more effective framework for negotiations. And there is little doubt that there ought to be more options to resolve uncertainty about aboriginal rights and title.
However, Premier Christy Clark's impatience to shake things up will make it harder to get the three principals in the room to talk about what the future should look like.
The Premier has apologized publicly for poor communications, but that isn't the half of it. She has left John Rustad, B.C. Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, with the unhappy task of trying to repair relations.
To recap, the first step on the Premier's new path to reconciliation was taken alone. With no warning, the province yanked its support for George Abbott as the new head of the B.C. Treaty Commission just as he was being briefed for the transition. His appointment had been approved by all three parties at the table.
Mr. Rustad issued a statement on March 20 explaining that the decision was just to allow a little pause, some time for reflection.
"We will work with the principals to appoint a chief commissioner and ensure that the work of the BC Treaty Commission goes on."
But when the Premier took questions on the matter a week later, what she described as a "principled policy decision" did not match Mr. Rustad's explanation. Her government would not support any candidate to serve as chief commissioner, and the Premier questioned whether the treaty commission should even exist.
Mr. Rustad, in an interview, could not say how or when that principled policy was formulated. "Obviously our thinking changed, or you could say advanced." He has had trouble, not surprisingly, getting Ottawa on the phone to set a date for discussions.
It was an open secret that B.C. has been sucking resources out of the treaty process in favour of economic deals. The province has secured 300 one-off settlements on resource sharing with individual First Nations, all of them completed without the federal government at the table, and to do that, treaty negotiators have been diverted to chase these kinds of deals.
But officials from the province assured Ottawa and First Nations that they were still committed to the treaty process. Earlier this month, the cabinet appointed Tom Happynook to the commission. Mr. Happynook was the negotiator who brought home one of B.C.'s modern-day treaties for his community – the Maa-nulth of Vancouver Island. "The biggest thing that helped me make the decision to take this is my desire to help bring about successful conclusions to treaties in B.C.," he said when he was appointed. Two weeks later, he's learned his job is to wrap up a last few treaty tables before the doors are closed.
"This has all the earmarks of a plan that is being made up as they go along," remarked outgoing chief commissioner Sophie Pierre.
The BC Treaty Commission was launched in 1993 with the expectation that there would be 30 treaties settled in the first seven years. Now, 22 years later, four treaties are complete. There are still 53 negotiating tables, but no more than ten are likely to reach a treaty in a reasonable time frame. They may be the last of their kind.
A pragmatic approach to settling aboriginal rights and title more quickly and at less cost is a laudable goal. But you cannot achieve certainty about who owns and governs the land base – the question that has hung over most of British Columbia for 150 years – through private resource deals alone.
It's clear B.C. wants to follow a new path, but the province needs to bring First Nations and the federal government along – a difficult task that requires a more careful and thoughtful approach than the Premier's office has shown here.