It’s contradictory and harmful.

The Tyee: The First Nations Leadership Council minced few words last week when they blasted Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad for making “inflammatory and ignorant” comments that included racist stereotypes about Indigenous people.

The council’s rebuke should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Rustad’s duplicitous approach to Indigenous rights since he assumed the leadership of the party last year.

When the Haida Nation Title Recognition Agreement came to the legislature in April, for example, Rustad praised the Haida on the “historic step” in their long battle to assert their right to the land.

But curiously, he took the occasion to talk at length about himself and his own view of title, a fundamental dimension of Indigenous rights.

“I think it might come as a surprise to some people to know that I support title,” he said then. Most of his audience in the chamber that day would be familiar with his record as Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation in Christy Clark’s BC Liberal government.

The statement contradicted Rustad’s record. In the wake of the landmark Tsilhqot’in Supreme Court decision that saw a first-ever declaration of title over 1,900 square kilometres in 2014, Rustad was in near-constant conflict with First Nations political leadership because the provincial government of the day sought to deny their obligation to recognize title.

Rustad went on to tell the Haida and the historic April 2024 session of the legislature that he had personally told the Attorney General’s office back in 2017 that just such an agreement, as was before him now, was needed in order to recognize Haida title. The province, he recounted, was “crazy” if they thought they could win against the Haida in court.

Then he turned things around again. The next day, Rustad recorded a video outside the legislature and posted it to X. In it, he denounced the Haida agreement. “This government has now put all of us in British Columbia at risk. And that is not the way a government should be,” he said in the video. “They should be addressing the issues for all British Columbians. Not just for Indigenous people.”

Gone was the decorum in chambers and Rustad’s supposed “support for title.” In its place was a lie that the agreement “undermined private property” and set a precedent that put everyone’s property in jeopardy provincewide. The agreement, in fact, is explicit about not impacting private property, nor local government jurisdiction and bylaws on Haida Gwaii.

This was not Rustad’s first about-face as the leader of the BC Conservatives. And it wasn’t his first foray into stoking fears of Indigenous jurisdiction and decision-making, framing both as threats to the well-being, property and democratic rights of non-Indigenous citizens.

A history of stoking fear

In February, he posted a similar video to X about a dock management plan between the province and Shíshálh Nation. “This is an authoritarian approach by a government, quite frankly, that is all about socialism,” he said.

This particular step into racist grievance politics must have been a shock to the leadership of the Shíshálh Nation. Rustad, after all, was the minister that began the dock management plan and advanced agreements that initiated the kind of shared decision-making approaches he now derides as a threat to democracy.

Rustad even took part in a historic ceremony where he was blanketed at the Shíshálh Nation’s Big House during a celebration for the signing of a landmark agreement by his successor, Minister of Indigenous Relations Scott Fraser. I worked as a senior advisor to Minister Fraser at the time. Our office had facilitated the invitation to Rustad.

In my experience, Rustad’s approach to Indigenous rights hung over the province’s relationship with nations long after he was out of office.

When the new BC NDP government took the helm in 2017, we would learn that many nations had not had access to former minister Rustad in years — particularly if their lands were not ensnared in forestry, mining or LNG.

Rustad was known for aggressively pursuing agreements that offered a pittance in compensation to accommodate infringement of rights in exchange for access to resources. These types of agreements make up the majority of the “435 agreements” Rustad so often touts as his reconciliation bona fides.

It was the Clark government’s LNG dreams which led Rustad to a full-court press to secure agreements with nations on more than half-a-dozen proposed pipeline routes criss-crossing northern B.C.

Unethical land sell-offs were made. Hereditary and elected governments were pitted against one another. The provincial government of the day preyed on a lack of economic opportunity to secure support for the pipelines it wanted.

It was not uncommon for nations to tell our office directly about strong-arm tactics by negotiators and former minister Rustad himself.

‘Economic reconciliation’?

Extractive projects, pipelines and logging were moving forward with or without a nation’s consent — many nations concluded they might as well get something in return.

Rustad now calls this approach to Indigenous rights “economic reconciliation.” I’d call it transactional and even predatory. At its core, it is about a Crown veto should a nation not consent to development.

To that end, Rustad has consistently rejected the principle of “free, prior and informed consent” found in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP.

Though he voted to support it in 2019, he is now pledging to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People’s Act, or DRIPA — the province’s seminal legislation to bring provincial laws into line with UNDRIP.

He has railed against the sections of the act that allow the B.C. government to reach agreements for shared decision-making authority with Indigenous governments and the negotiated transfer of jurisdiction to those governments. In other words, the very operationalization of title Rustad told the Haida and the rest of B.C. he supports.

Caught in the gusts of the far-right windstorm that has propelled his revival from political oblivion, Rustad’s campaign is normalizing a zero-sum framing that positions Indigenous rights as a threat to the broader non-Indigenous public.

It’s important to note that the BC NDP’s record on Indigenous rights is checkered. But it’s progress, however tepid. And efforts to make good on title recognition and self-determination are a direct response to decades of landmark court cases on constitutionally protected rights. Key legislation, like DRIPA, has been co-developed in partnership with First Nations political leadership.

As the free enterprise coalition coalesces and powerful business interests line up to endorse what Rustad refers to as a “common sense” agenda, they’d do well to remember why the Business Council of B.C. and other business groups once vocally supported the implementation of UNDRIP.

The alternative involves ever more costly litigation and renewed conflict. Plus a grinding halt to the very economic activity Rustad so desires. To say nothing of retrograde violations of Indigenous rights.

Jonathan Sas, The Tyee

Jonathan Sas was senior advisor to the BC NDP Minister of Indigenous Relations between 2017-19 and is a co-author of Seeking Social Democracy. He lives in Toronto.