Tsawwassen Speaker Squiqel Tony Jacobs arrives for a legislative sitting. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

From Resource Works

By Nelson Bennett

Cowichan case underscores case for fast-tracking treaties

If there are any doubts over the question of which route is best for settling aboriginal title and reconciliation – the courts or treaty negotiations – a new economic snapshot on the Tsawwassen First Nation should put the question to rest.

Thanks to a modern day treaty, implemented in 2009, the Tsawwassen have leveraged land, cash and self-governance to parlay millions into hundreds of millions a year, according to a new report by Deloitte on behalf of the BC Treaty Commission.

With just 532 citizens, the Tsawwassen First Nation now provides $485 million in annual employment and 11,000 permanent retail and warehouse jobs, the report states.

Deloitte estimates modern treaties will provide $1 billion to $2 billion in economic benefits over the next decade.

“What happens, when you transfer millions to First Nations, it turns into billions, and it turns into billions for everyone,” Sashia Leung, director of international relations and communication for the BC Treaty Commission, said at the Indigenous Partnership Success Showcase on November 13.

“Tsawwassen alone, after 16 years of implementing their modern treaty, are one of the biggest employers in the region.”

BC Treaty Commission’s Sashia Leung speaks at the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase 2025.

Nisga’a success highlights economic potential

The Nisga’a is another good case study. The Nisga’a were the first indigenous group in B.C. to sign a modern treaty.

Having land and self-governance powers gave the Nisga’a the base for economic development, which now includes a $22 billion LNG and natural gas pipeline project – Ksi Lisims LNG and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line.

“This is what reconciliation looks like: a modern Treaty Nation once on the sidelines of our economy, now leading a project that will help write the next chapter of a stronger, more resilient Canada,” Nisga’a Nation president Eva Clayton noted last year, when the project received regulatory approval.

While the modern treaty making process has moved at what seems a glacial pace since it was established in the mid-1990s, there are some signs of gathering momentum.

This year alone, three First Nations signed final treaty settlement agreements: Kitselas, Kitsumkalum and K’omoks.

“That’s the first time that we’ve ever seen, in the treaty negotiation process, that three treaties have been initialed in one year and then ratified by their communities,” Treaty Commissioner Celeste Haldane told me.

Courts versus negotiation

When it comes to settling the question of who owns the land in B.C. — the Crown or First Nations — there is no one-size-fits-all pathway.

Some First Nations have chosen the courts. To date, only one has succeeded in gaining legal recognition of aboriginal title through the courts — the Tsilhqot’in.

The recent Cowichan decision, in which a lower court recognized aboriginal title to a parcel of land in Richmond, is by no means a final one.

That decision opened a can of worms that now has private land owners worried that their properties could fall under aboriginal title. The court ruling is being appealed and will almost certainly end up having to go to the Supreme Court.

This issue could, and should, be resolved through treaty negotiations, not the courts.

The Cowichan, after all, are in the Hul’qumi’num treaty group, which is at stage 5 of a six-stage process in the BC Treaty process. So why are they still resorting to the courts to settle title issues?

The Cowichan title case is the very sort of legal dispute that the B.C. and federal governments were trying to avoid when it set up the BC Treaty process in the mid-1990s.

Accelerating the process

Unfortunately, modern treaty making has been agonizingly slow.

To date, there are only seven modern implemented treaties to show for three decades of works — eight if you count the Nisga’a treaty, which predated the BC Treaty process.

Modern treaty nations include the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen, Tla’amin and five tribal groups in the Maa-nulth confederation on Vancouver Island.

It takes an average of 10 years to negotiate a final treaty settlement. Getting a court ruling on aboriginal title can take just as long and really only settles one question: Who owns the land?

The B.C. government has been trying to address rights and title through other avenues, including incremental agreements and a tripartite reconciliation process within the BC Treaty process.

It was this latter tripartite process that led to the Haida agreement, which recognized Haida title over Haida Gwaii earlier this year.

These shortcuts chip away at issues of aboriginal rights and title, self-governance, resource ownership and taxation and revenue generation.

Modern treaties are more comprehensive, settling everything from who owns the land and who gets the tax revenue from it, to how much salmon a nation is entitled to annually.

Once modern treaties are in place, it gives First Nations a base from which to build their own economies.

The Tsawwassen First Nation is one of the more notable case studies for the economic and social benefits that accrue, not just to the nation, but to the local economy in general.

The Tsawwassen have used the cash, land and taxation powers granted to them under treaty to create thousands of new jobs. This has been done through the development of industrial, commercial and residential lands.

This includes the development of Tsawwassen Mills and Tsawwassen Commons, an Amazon warehouse, a container inspection centre, and a new sewer treatment plant in support of a major residential development.

“They have provided over 5,000 lease homes for Delta, for Vancouver,” Leung noted. “They have a vision to continue to build that out to 10,000 to 12,000.”

Removing barriers to agreement

For First Nations, some of the reticence in negotiating a treaty in the past was the cost and the loss of tax exemptions. But those sticking points have been removed in recent years.

First Nations in treaty negotiations were originally required to borrow money from the federal government to participate, and then that loan amount was deducted from whatever final cash settlement was agreed to.

That requirement was eliminated in 2019, and there has been loan forgiveness to those nations that concluded treaties.

Another sticking point was the loss of tax exemptions. Under Section 87 of Indian Act, sales and property taxes do not apply on reserve lands.

But under modern treaties, the Indian Act ceases to apply, and reserve lands are transferred to title lands. This meant giving up tax exemptions to get treaty settlements.

That too has been amended, and carve-outs are now allowed in which the tax exemptions can continue on those reserve lands that get transferred to title lands.

“Now, it’s up to the First Nation to determine when and if they want to phase out Section 87 protections,” Haldane said.

Haldane said she believes these recent changes may account for the recent progress it has seen at the negotiation table.

“That’s why you’re seeing K’omoks, Kitselas, Kitsumkalum – three treaties being ratified in one year,” she said. “It’s unprecedented.”

The Mark Carney government has been on a fast-tracking kick lately. But we want to avoid the kind of uncertainty that the Cowichan case raises, and if the Carney government is looking for more things to fast-track that would benefit First Nations and the Canadian economy, perhaps treaty making should be one of them.

Resource Works News

This is a special preview article from the:

By Tom Flanagan

When the book Grave Error was published by True North in late 2023, it became an instant best-seller. People wanted to read the book because it contained well-documented information not readily available elsewhere concerning the history of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) and the facts surrounding recent claims about “unmarked graves.”

Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong is the just-published sequel to Grave Error. Edited by Chris Champion and me, with chapters written by knowledgeable academics, journalists, researchers and even several contributors who once worked directly in residential schools or dedicated Indian hospitals, Dead Wrong was published because the struggle for accurate information on this contentious subject continues. Let me share with you a little of what’s in Dead Wrong.

Outrageously, the New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper among liberals and “progressives”, has never retracted its outrageously false headline that “mass graves” were uncovered at Kamloops in 2021. Journalist Jonathan Kay exposes that scandal.

With similarly warped judgment, the legacy media were enthused about last year’s so-called documentary Sugarcane, a feature-length film sponsored by National Geographic and nominated for an Academy Award. The only reporter to spot Sugarcane’s dozens of egregious factual errors was independent journalist Michelle Stirling; her expose is included in Dead Wrong.

In spring 2024, the small Interior B.C. city of Quesnel made national news when the mayor’s wife bought ten copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. After noisy protests by people who had never read the book, Quesnel city council voted to censure Mayor Ron Paull and tried to force him from office. It’s all described in Dead Wrong.

Also not to be forgotten is how the Law Society of B.C. has forced upon its members training materials that assert against all evidence that children’s remains have been discovered at Kamloops. As told by James Pew, B.C. MLA Dallas Brodie was expelled not from the NDP but from the Conservative caucus for daring to point out this obvious and incontrovertible
falsehood. But the facts are that ground-penetrating radar (used at the former Kamloops IRS) can detect only “anomalies” or “disturbances”, not identify what those might be; that no excavations have been carried out; and that no human remains whatsoever, let alone “215 children’s bodies”, have been found there. Brodie is completely correct.

Then there is the story of Jim McMurtry, suspended by the Abbotsford District School Board shortly after the May 2021 Kamloops announcement. McMurtry’s offence was to tell students the truth that, while some Indigenous students did die in residential schools, the main cause was tuberculosis. His own book The Scarlet Lesson is excerpted in Dead Wrong.

Historian Ian Gentles and former IRS teacher Pim Wiebel offer a richly detailed analysis of health and medical conditions in the schools. They show that these were much better than what prevailed in the Indian reserves from which most students came.

Another important contribution to understanding the medical issues is by Dr. Eric Schloss, narrating the history of the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. IRS facilities usually included small clinics, but students with serious problems were often transferred to Indian Hospitals for more intensive care. Schloss, who worked in the Camsell, describes how it delivered state-of-the-art medicine, probably better than the care available to most non-native children anywhere in Canada at the time.

Rodney Clifton’s contribution, “They would call me a ‘Denier,’” describes his personal experiences working in two IRS in the 1960s. Clifton does not tell stories of hunger, brutal punishment and suppression of Indigenous culture, but of games, laughter and trying to learn native languages from his Indian and Inuit charges.

And far from the IRS system being a deliberate, sustained program of cultural genocide, as Toronto lawyer and historian Greg Piasetzki explains, the historical fact is that “Canada Wanted to Close All Residential Schools in the 1940s. Here’s why it couldn’t.” That’s because for many Aboriginal parents, particularly single parents and/or those with large numbers of children,
residential schools were the best deal available. In addition to schooling their kids, they offered paid employment to large numbers of Indigenous Canadians as cooks, janitors, farmers and health care workers, and later as teachers and even principals.

Another gravely important issue is the recent phenomenon of charging critics with “residential school denialism.” This is a false accusation hurled by true believers in what has become known as the “Kamloops narrative”, aimed at shutting down criticism or questions. A key event in this process was when NDP MP Leah Gazan in 2022 persuaded the House of Commons to approve a
resolution “That, in the opinion of the House this government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide.”

In 2024, Gazan took the next step by introducing a private member’s bill to criminalize dissent about the IRS system.  Remember, the slur of “denialist” is a term drawn from earlier debates about the Holocaust. Gazan’s bill failed to pass, but she reintroduced it in 2025. Had such provisions been in force back in 2021, it might well have become a crime to point out that the
Kamloops GPR survey had identified soil anomalies, not buried bodies. Frances Widdowson examines this sordid political campaign of denunciation.

As the proponents of the Kamloops narrative fail to provide convincing hard evidence for it, they hope to mobilize the authority of the state to stamp out dissent. One of the main goals behind publication of Dead Wrong is to head off this drive toward authoritarianism.

Happily, Dead Wrong is already an Amazon best-seller based on pre-publication orders. The struggle for truth continues.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published by C2C Journal.

Tom Flanagan is the author of many books on Indigenous history and policy, including (with C.P. Champion) the best-selling Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us and the Truth about Residential Schools.