14 | MÁKOOK PI SÉLIM | INDIGENOUS BUSINESS MAGAZINE JUNE 2022 PUBLISHED BY BUSINESS IN VANCOUVER
DRIPA ACTION PLAN
Action was needed, but is the plan bold, bureaucratic or both?
MERLE ALEXANDER
B
.C. First Nations sought an action plan that would bring a reckoning to colonialism, deliver the tectonic change that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) embodies and be the knockout punch to racism within the law. No small task — I guess we needed capes, not Zoom meetings. The fact is that implementing UNDRIP is a marathon relay race, not a sprint for today’s best and brightest. Reversing colonialism will take generations, and B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) Action Plan is the beginning, not the end. So, is the Action Plan bold? Yes, it is bold enough. The 89 actions will take more than the existing capacity within Indigenous right-holders to deliver true change in five years. We are mighty but we do not have the thousands of lawyers, consultants and technicians of our Crown “partners.” Is the Action Plan bureaucratic? Yes, it is bureaucratic aplenty. Indigenous Peoples are “co-developers” of UNDRIP implementation, but we are not yet “co-drafters.” As a lawyer, I am drawn to the legal reform initiatives. There are some exceptional commitments to modernize legislation, including: ■ DRIPA s.7 (2.4 & 2.5); ■ Environmental assessment – cumulative impacts (2.6); ■ Emergency Management legislation (2.7); ■ Forest legislation (2.10); and ■ Mineral Tenure Act (2.14). On DRIPA section 7, we are experiencing inertia that prevents the mandating of consent-based decision-making. You can expect that these two actions will deliver a broader opening (hopefully a global opening) of the enabled consent-based negotiations that need to occur in B.C. So instead of the lone Tahltan Nation’s environmental assessment consent agreement, there will dozens of negotiations throughout the province. This single action alone could empower right-holders where it counts. On environmental assessment, instead of the tunnel vision
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The B.C. government's DRIPA Action Plan was released in March 2022 • PROVINCE OF BC/FLICKR
assessment of single approvals, B.C. will need to honour the Blueberry River First Nation legal victory and consider the cumulative effects of industrial activity within a region. We need to track the saturation of projects that are like death by a thousand cuts in our territories. Also, you can predictably expect that First Nations will want to see consent as a legal requirement, instead of consensus as an aim.
2022-05-31 3:02 PM
