Some suspect she’s been set up to take the fall if DRIPA talks fail; others suggest she’s being positioned as Eby’s successor
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VICTORIA — Premier David Eby was quick to credit Attorney General Niki Sharma this week for the last-minute agreement that avoided an imminent showdown with Indigenous leaders over the DRIPA legislation.
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“She came to me and told me that she believed that there was a route to be able to reach an agreement,” Eby told reporters. “I want to thank the attorney general for tapping me on the shoulder and creating the space for this conversation to be able to happen.”
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Eby thus gave welcome credit to Sharma. She has been taking heat from Indigenous leaders for her own role in the plan to amend or suspend the legislation that made provincial laws subject to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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Some speculated Eby was tagging the attorney general as a preferred successor in the event being premier doesn’t, you know, work out for him much longer.
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Then again, consider the possibility that Eby was simply letting everyone know who to blame if the agreement doesn’t work out.
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The agreement calls for the province and Indigenous leaders to spend the next few months — before the Oct. 5 start of the fall legislature session — discussing the government’s concerns with the legislation.
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Just last week Eby laid out the “significant risks” of putting off action until the fall.
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He says some 20 Indigenous claims against the province have already been amended after a Court of Appeal finding that B.C.’s mineral claims legislation was incompatible with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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Already, one court decision “directly impacts government’s liability in class actions, another the Freedom of Information Act, and we expect those decisions to start to come with greater frequency,” said the premier.
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“The other challenge is we have statutory decision-makers throughout government in a whole array of fields from the resource world to permitting and licensing. We have to provide instructions to them about the policies and so on that they need to deal with, and how to interpret the legislation that we have charged them to apply when they’re doing their work,” the premier continued.
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“We’re talking about tens of thousands of people across the province that do this work. The enormity of what would be required in order to reposition the public service to avoid significant additional litigation risk is very significant.”
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The prospect is not hypothetical. Already there are reports that decision-making across government is stalled as public servants wrestle with how to reconcile the broad public interest with the UN Declaration.
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Eby: “That’s just a few examples of why we feel a sense of urgency around this, why we think sooner is better than later, and some of what’s informing that, obviously, is there’s not a clear benefit to waiting and there are very significant risks in delaying.”
