I have been taken to task, more than once now, for a single word. Not for an argument, not for a claim about treaties or seats or the Crown, but for one plain word I keep using: settler. It lands on certain readers like an accusation, and a few have told me so with real heat, some on their way out the door. I have thought about this more than the size of the word might seem to warrant, because the trouble it causes is not really about the word at all. It is about what people believe is hidden inside it. So let me take it out and turn it over in the light, and say plainly what I mean by it and what I do not.

I use the word to describe, not to prescribe. That is the whole of it, and almost everything else follows from getting that distinction straight. When I call myself a settler — and I do, without flinching and without apology — I am not making a confession or accepting a charge. I am locating myself on a map. The word tells you where I stand in relation to how this country came to be. It says nothing whatever about my character, my worth, my politics, or what I owe in my own conscience. It says only this: that I am not a member of the nations who were here, governing this land, when my Crown arrived and made agreements with them. I came by the other road. So did my family, and so did most families in this province. There is no shame folded into that fact, and I carry none, and it costs me nothing to say so. It is simply true, the way a contour line on a map is true. It describes a position. It does not pass a sentence.

But the word rarely arrives clean anymore, and I understand why people bristle. It has been put to other uses. There is a strain of progressive and radical thought that wields settler not as a description but as a verdict, a thing you are meant to feel sad about, and then guilty about, and finally to atone for. In that mouth the word comes wrapped in a quiet suggestion that your very presence here is a standing wrong, that you live on stolen ground and ought to feel the theft in your bones every morning. Said that way, it stops being a word on a map and becomes a finger pointed at your chest. So when a reader recoils from it, I do not think he is being unreasonable. He is reacting, correctly, to the sentence smuggled inside the description. My quarrel is not with him. It is with the people who did the smuggling.

And here is where I part company with that strain, and sharply. What it has done is take the whole tangled, living, two-sided relationship between peoples and press it flat into a shape we have all seen before: oppressor and oppressed, settler and native, two fixed classes locked in permanent antagonism. It is the old Marxist move performed with new costumes, the same dialectic of the guilty and the wronged, only with the language of class quietly swapped out for the language of ancestry. And like every binary of that kind, it is false, because human beings and the histories they make do not sort themselves into two clean piles of villains and victims. They never have. The binary survives not because it is true but because it is simple, and because it is generous with the one thing political movements are always short of: someone to blame.

What troubles me most about it, though, is not that it is false. It is that it is useless to the very people it claims to defend. A relationship frozen into oppressor and oppressed cannot move. It can only be managed. It casts Indigenous nations forever in the role of the wronged and the settler forever in the role of the wrongdoer, and two parties pinned into those roles can do nothing together but re-enact the grievance, year after year, with no door out. And year after year is exactly how it has gone. Meanwhile a whole class of people has grown up around the managing of it — the consultants and the officers, the framework-writers, the academics with careers built atop the suffering — and that class has no reason on earth to want the quarrel resolved, because the quarrel is what it lives on. The permanent tension is not a problem to them. It is the product. Resolution would put them out of work. So the binary endures, and it serves them handsomely, and it does precisely nothing for the child on a reserve still waiting on clean water, or for the nation still waiting on a seat at a table where the real decisions get made.

So let me be plain about where the line actually falls, because the binary depends on no one ever looking at it too closely. When I say settler, I am not drawing the line at the first human footprint on this continent. I could not draw it there if I wanted to, and neither can anyone else, because that line is lost to deep time and always will be. The line I mean is not prehistoric. It is legal, and it is written down. It falls exactly where the Crown — my Crown, the same one I appeal to the moment I am wronged by my neighbour or my government — arrived to find organized nations already here, in possession of the land and governing themselves, and chose to enter into agreements with them. That is the line. Everyone who comes to this place by way of that Crown and those agreements, rather than as a member of the nations the Crown treated with, stands on the settler side of it. I do. That is all the word has ever meant in my hands.

Which is why I have so little patience left for the argument that turns up like clockwork the instant any of this is raised: that other peoples were here before the Indigenous nations too, that those nations displaced still earlier ones, that if you only run the tape back far enough we are all settlers and the whole question politely dissolves. I want to call that argument what it is. It is a weak argument wearing the costume of a strong one. It dresses itself up as historical honesty, as a brave willingness to ask who really came first, when its actual job is to take a real, dated, documented obligation and lose it in an unanswerable fog about the last ice age. You cannot relitigate who walked this ground ten thousand years ago in order to wriggle out of a treaty your Crown signed in 1763. The agreements do not turn on who came before. They were made with the nations who were here, as nations, on the day they were made. That is the only “first” the law has ever cared about, and no amount of speculation about the Pleistocene moves it an inch.

There is usually a second assumption hiding underneath that one, quieter and worth dragging into the open: the notion that those older displacements somehow stain the Indigenous claim, as though a people had to be innocent to be owed anything. This is where an old ghost walks back into the room, the one the eighteenth century called the noble savage. It is an ancient European habit, this one, usually laid at Rousseau’s door though he never used the phrase and it is older than him by far: the habit of imagining the native peoples of the New World as innocents, children of nature, peaceable and pure and uncorrupted until the wicked European turned up to spoil the garden. It was always a fantasy. And the nations of this land were nothing of the kind, because they were human. On this very coast the Haida and the Tlingit were feared warriors and slaveholders who raided the length of the seaboard and counted, in some villages, a quarter of their people as slaves taken in war. In the east the Haudenosaunee broke and scattered whole confederacies in the Beaver Wars, leaving the Wendat, the Erie, and the Neutral gone or absorbed. There was conquest here, and displacement, and slavery, and there was also diplomacy and alliance and empire, long centuries before any European laid eyes on the place. Because that is what human beings do, on every continent, in every age.

And I say all of that not to diminish them by a single degree, but to dignify them. A people romanticized as innocent is a people robbed of its full humanity, frozen into a diorama and admired the way one admires a sunset, beautifully, from a safe distance, and with no obligation owed to a thing so passive and so pure. The nations of this land were not sunsets. They were nations: governing, fighting, holding ground and losing it, striking bargains and keeping some and breaking others, doing all the hard and human work of peoples who hold real power. That is exactly why their sovereignty was real. And it is exactly why the agreements the Crown made with them carry the weight they do. You do not sign treaties with children of nature. You sign them with powers. The messy, warlike, fully human history is not an embarrassment to the claim. It is the foundation of it.

So I come, at the last, to the reader who tells me, with some feeling, that he is simply a Canadian, full stop, and will answer to no other label. I want him to know I am not coming at that pride from somewhere outside it. I share it, and then some. I am not merely a Canadian; I am a besotted one. I read this country’s history for pleasure and study it with something close to zeal. I once wore the uniform of its Armed Forces as an officer, and I did not put it on for a paycheque. I put it on because I believe, plainly and without embarrassment, that this is the best country on earth, and one of the very few with any honest standing to go out into the world and try to set things right. So when a man tells me he is proud to be a Canadian and wants no other word, I do not hear a stranger. I hear myself.

And yet I would ask him to sit a moment with where that proud word actually comes from, because the truth of it is stranger and finer than the pride tends to know. Canada is not a European word at all. It is Iroquoian — kanata, a village, a settlement — overheard by Cartier from his Indigenous guides and carried off to name half a continent. And the first people the French called Canadiens were not the French. They were the nations already here. Only later did the of-the-land French take the name for themselves: the habitants and the traders, the locally born, the ones who had grown into this place rather than merely landing on it. When the gentlemen back in France used the word of them, it carried more condescension than pride, the sense of a people too rough, too far from Paris, too much of the land and the people. My own family was among them. They came as fur traders, and they were mocked, by the gentlemen of France and the gentlemen of England both, for going too native: for dressing like the nations they lived and worked beside, for taking on the customs and the kin and the whole cast of mind of a continent the establishment had only ever meant to harvest. There is a deep irony in people of that descent now wearing the name Canadian as though it raised them above and apart from the very peoples it first described, and once mocked us for coming to resemble.

So I understand the pride better than the reader might guess, and I honour it. But Canadian, for all of that, remains a roof that shelters everyone and therefore distinguishes no one. The Songhees are Canadian. So am I. The word is true and it is nowhere near enough, because it cannot tell us what is owed between the nations who were here and the people who came after. It was built, over centuries, to do the very opposite, to fold that distinction into one shared citizenship and let it rest. And the distinction is the entire question. To answer it with “I am Canadian” is not to settle the hard thing. It is, with the best will in the world, to decline to look at it.

I am not asking anyone to feel guilty. Guilt is a useless currency and I have none to spend or to collect. I am asking only that we be able to say plainly where each of us stands, because you cannot honour an agreement you will not even admit you are a party to. Reconciliation — the real article, not the industry that has stolen its name — has to begin there, with the relationship named honestly and out loud. And you cannot name a relationship while refusing to hold half of its vocabulary.

So I will keep using the word, because it is the truest one I have yet found. Never as a charge. Always as a description, a contour line on the map of how this country was truly made. And I will correct one thing I said near the start, because working all of this through has shown me it was too glib. I said the word costs me nothing. That is not quite right. It does cost something, because from that one plain word flows an obligation to the agreements we entered into and have inherited whole, to the promises my Crown made and handed down to me whether I asked for them or not. To call myself a settler is to admit, out loud, that those promises bind me. And honouring what you have been handed, especially when it asks something of you that you would rather not give, is not the soft position, and it is not the fashionable one. It is the most conservative thing a person can do.

The obligation, I am certain of. The word itself I hold more loosely, the way a man ought to hold a tool he picked up on his own and would set down without complaint the moment someone handed him a better one. I might well be wrong about settler. It may be the word is simply too battered now to do honest work, too long swung as a club, too thoroughly claimed by people who only ever meant it to wound. If that is so, then I am asking the question plainly, and with no trap laid in it: what word would you have us use instead? Not Canadian, which we have seen is too broad to carry the distinction and was built over centuries to dissolve it. Some other word, then. But it has to do the real work. It has to name, honestly, the difference between the nations who were here and the people who came after, because that difference is the whole of what reconciliation must reckon with, and no silence about it has ever made it smaller.

There is only one thing I will not do, and it is the very thing this project of mine exists to refuse. I will not let the loudest and the angriest be the ones who decide what our words are allowed to mean. They did not invent settler, and they do not own it, any more than they own treaty or nation or Canadian. They took good and useful words and bent them into instruments of blame, and the answer to that is not to drop the words and back quietly away. It is to pick them up again, to define them plainly, to use them accurately, and to put them to work for something far better than grievance. That is what I am trying to do here, in my own plain way. Not to judge our language by what has been made of it in its worst hands, but to reclaim it, and to aim it at the only end that was ever worth aiming at: lives of dignity, for all of us, First Nations and settler together, in this country I cannot help but love.

Raise the idea, in almost any room in this province, that Indigenous nations should hold real seats in the legislature, and you will meet the same two arguments before the coffee has gone cold. Both arrive wearing the clothes of fairness, which is exactly why they work and exactly why they need answering carefully rather than quickly.

The first says Aboriginal rights are race-based. We believe in equal treatment under the law, the argument goes, so a right that attaches to one group by ancestry is a privilege, and privileges by ancestry are the thing equality exists to abolish.

The second says the matter was closed by history. The settlers came, the settlers won, the country was built, and all of it happened a very long time ago. Whatever was owed has long since lapsed.

One argument calls the rights illegitimate at the root. The other calls them expired by the calendar. They point at different things, but they arrive at the same place, and the place is the whole point of the trip: a province that never has to widen the table by a single chair. Both deserve a real answer. Both have one.

Start with the race argument, because it is the more honest mistake of the two and the easier to clear up.

A right that genuinely lived in the blood would behave like blood. It would belong to everyone who carried the ancestry, anywhere on earth, for as long as the line continued, and to no one who did not. Aboriginal rights have never worked that way, for the simple reason that the courts have never understood them that way. In R. v. Van der Peet in 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada set out what these rights actually are and where they come from. They exist, the Court said, to reconcile one historical fact with another: that when the Crown asserted sovereignty, Aboriginal peoples were already here, organized in distinctive societies, occupying and governing the land as they had for centuries. The right flows from that prior occupation and that political existence. It is the recognition of a society that was here first, not a benefit handed down to a bloodline. And notice what that does not require: not a claim to being the first humans ever to stand on this ground, but the plain fact that the Crown arrived to find organized nations already here and in possession, and chose to make agreements with them. You cannot re-litigate who stood on this soil ten thousand years ago to wriggle out of a treaty signed in 1763.

That distinction is not academic hair-splitting. It decides who actually holds a right and who does not. In R. v. Powley in 2003, the Court was asked who counts as Métis for the purpose of exercising a constitutional right, and the answer it gave demolished the race framing on its own terms. There is no blood-quantum test, the Court held. Ancestry alone settles nothing. What a person has to show is membership in a living community — self-identification, a genuine ancestral connection, and acceptance by the community itself. A person can carry Indigenous ancestry and hold no Aboriginal right at all, because the right runs through belonging to a nation, not through a result on a DNA test.

We grasp this everywhere else without effort. When Ottawa signs a treaty with France, nobody calls it a racial preference for the French. It is an agreement between two political communities, and it binds the parties who made it. A treaty or a recognized right held by an Indigenous nation is the same kind of thing — an arrangement between political bodies, carrying obligations in both directions. The only reason anyone paints one as racial and not the other is that they have already decided how they need the argument to come out.

So the relabelling is a swap, and a clever one. Take a political relationship, repaint it in racial colours, then summon the principle of equal treatment that every decent person already carries in their chest, and let that good principle perform a demolition you would never be permitted to do in the open. The equality is real. The fraud is in the substitution. Nobody is asking for a privilege of birth. They are asking for a political relationship to be honoured. Name the swap and there is nothing left standing.

The second argument is older, and it dies harder, so it has earned more than a wave of the hand.

The picture in most heads is straightforward. The settlers arrived, the settlers prevailed, and winning closed the books. It is a tidy story and a flattering one, and it is wrong in the law and wrong in the history both, by a wide margin and on the record.

There was no conquest of Indigenous peoples in this country in any sense a court would recognize. The Crown asserted sovereignty; it did not win the land in war. That is not my phrasing — it is the Supreme Court’s. In Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia in 2014, the first case in Canadian history to grant a declaration of Aboriginal title, and a British Columbia case at that, Chief Justice McLachlin wrote that when the Crown asserted sovereignty it acquired underlying title to the land, but that this title was burdened from the very start by the pre-existing rights of the peoples already here. And she put the oldest excuse to rest by name. The doctrine of terra nullius — the convenient fiction that the land was empty and waiting — never applied in Canada, she wrote, as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 itself confirmed. The Crown’s own founding document recognized Indigenous nations as distinct peoples holding land that was not simply there for the taking.

In British Columbia none of this is theoretical, and that is the part people from elsewhere tend to miss. Over most of this province the land was never surrendered, never purchased, never treated for at all. That is precisely why the title question is still live, still grinding through the courts a century and a half later. The Tsilhqot’in spent decades in litigation to win a declaration of title to their own territory. Nobody spends that long in court proving he was never conquered if the conquest were a settled fact. The litigation exists because the conquest does not.

And then there is the fact that should have buried this argument generations ago. When Indigenous nations went to war alongside the settlers, they went as allies.

Not as conscripts. Not as subjects marched out by a Crown that owned them. As sovereign partners the Crown courted, leaned on, and could not have managed without. The War of 1812 is the cleanest example we have. Tecumseh’s confederacy fought beside the British, and the historians are blunt about why. Chief Tecumseh fought not for the British but for his own people, for Native independence and for ancestral land the Americans were taking. The nations joined the British side, as the record has it, in exchange for assurances they could keep that land. Britain did not have the men to hold half a continent on its own, and everyone in the room understood it.

Hold that beside the conquest story and watch it come apart. A conquered subject is not courted. A conquered subject does not choose his war or set his own terms for fighting it. You cannot be the vanquished and the indispensable ally in the same breath. And the archive agrees with the battlefield. Search it as long as you like and you will not find articles of surrender, nor a treaty handing sovereignty up to the Crown. What the records hold instead are alliance treaties and land agreements, every one of them assuming the Indigenous side arrived already holding the sovereignty it was negotiating with. You do not bargain with a party that has nothing to bring to the table.

This is not a fringe reading of the history. It is the work of the people who have actually done the studying — Brian Slattery, whose account of the foundations of Aboriginal rights the Supreme Court has leaned on for decades; Kent McNeil, who traced the common-law roots of Aboriginal title; the Court’s own line of decisions running from Calder in 1973 through Van der Peet and on to Tsilhqot’in. The reasoned judgment is in, and it has been in for a long time. What is missing is not the law or the history. What is missing is the will to act on either.

Set the two arguments side by side, which is how they were always meant to be used. Fail to kill the rights by branding them racial, and you brand them ancient instead. Lose the conquest story under cross-examination, and you fall back on the race framing. Two doors, and the same empty room behind both. The object in either case is to make the question disappear without anyone ever being made to answer it.

And the disappearing act pays. So long as the rights can be cast as either illegitimate or expired, no one is obliged to do the work — to build the seats, draft the structure, widen the table by a chair. The confusion is not the unhappy by-product of a genuinely hard problem. The confusion is the product on the shelf, and there is a whole industry keeping it stocked.

So keep two things in your pocket, because these arguments will find you — in a comment thread, across a kitchen table, usually when you are least in the mood for them.

The rights were never about blood. They are about nations.

And the nations were never conquered. They were allies, and we have spent a long time now declining to give allies the seat that allies are owed.

But the kitchen table is not where this gets settled, and there is a third version of the argument that deserves more respect than the other two, because it deals in no disappearing act at all. It concedes the rights are real and current, looks straight at them, and says: then change the law. Section 35 is not scripture. It was written by people and it can be rewritten by people, through the same constitutional process that produced it. That much is true. It is also, at this moment, a live proposal.

The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, has opened the door to exactly that — a conversation among the premiers about reworking the parts of the constitution that govern treaty and Aboriginal rights, on the argument that the courts have stretched Section 35 well past anything that was ever intended. Say this for her against the kitchen-table crowd: she is not pretending the rights are racial, and she is not pretending they expired. She is looking at them honestly and proposing, in the open, to amend them.

She is also, by the only measure that should count for anyone who claims the word, not being conservative at all.

A conservative does not weigh an inherited obligation by whether it has grown inconvenient this year. That was the whole of Burke’s quarrel with the revolutionaries — that they treated the inheritance handed down to them, the agreements and institutions and settled commitments, as furniture to be hauled to the curb the moment it stopped suiting the mood of the season. He understood a country as a partnership across the generations: between the dead who made the promises, the living who are bound to keep them, and the unborn who will inherit whatever we leave standing or leave broken. You do not get to tear up your grandfather’s signature because the bill has come due on your watch. Honouring what you were handed, especially when it costs you something, is not a sentimental flourish on conservatism. It is the spine of it.

And a treaty is the most literal inheritance there is. It was signed by people with the authority to sign it, on the plain understanding that it would bind those who came after. Reopening the constitution to strip a people of the protections their ancestors were promised is not the careful, conserving act it dresses itself up as. It is the radical one. Whatever else you call the man reaching for the eraser, you should not call him a conservative.

That is the offer we still have not made — to honour what was handed down by giving allies the seat that allies are owed. The alternative on the table is to take an eraser to the inheritance and call the erasing prudence. Everything else is the elaborate business of pretending we do not have to.

I have been thinking lately about how a political tradition gets sick, which is a different thing entirely from how it gets beaten. Being beaten is clean enough. You lose an election, you lick your wounds, you regroup, and you come back, and everyone can see plainly what happened to you and roughly when. Sickness is quieter, and for that reason more dangerous, because it hollows a thing out from the inside while it is still up and walking around, insisting to anyone who asks that it has never felt better. The patient keeps all the outward signs of health. He has the flag and the lawn signs and the rallies and the followers stacked up by the hundred thousand. What he has mislaid somewhere along the way is the only thing that ever made him worth following to begin with.

That, as best I can tell, is where Canadian conservatism finds itself now. I want to try to account for how it got here honestly, which means resisting the easy comfort of laying the whole business at somebody else’s door. Some of it does belong at other doors. But not the worst of it.

Start with the universities, because the university is where a political tradition is supposed to go to grow its intellectual roots, or where it used to go. This past March a doctoral researcher at Oxford named James Manzi published a study in the journal Theory and Society that had not really been done before at that scale. He ran very nearly six hundred thousand social science abstracts, drawn from more than three hundred journals and published between 1960 and 2024, through a large language model trained to place each one on a fixed political spectrum. The finding was not subtle. Something close to ninety per cent of the politically relevant work leaned left, and the average position of every single social science discipline he examined came out left of centre in every single year of the survey. Not most years. Every year. And the disciplines that leaned furthest left turned out to be the same ones that had grown most uniform, the ones in which a dissenting voice had become hardest to find at all.

Set that beside what we already know about who is doing the teaching. The work of Mitchell Langbert and his colleagues, who went and counted faculty by their own voter registration rather than guessing at their sympathies, found registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans across the professoriate by something on the order of eight to one, and far more lopsidedly than that in precisely the disciplines that matter most to the questions I am circling here. In history the ratio ran past thirty to one. In sociology and anthropology it ran higher still, to the point where in some departments a conservative is less outnumbered than simply absent. I want to be careful, because this counting is largely American, and our own Canadian figures are thinner and less faithfully kept. But nobody who has spent any time near a Canadian humanities faculty believes the direction of the thing is different on our side of the line.

What that means, when you sit with it a while, is that the right-leaning intellectual — the person who in an earlier generation might have spent a working life building a rigorous conservative account of how a country ought to govern itself, or hold its property, or read its own laws — has been quietly shown the door of the very institutions built to house that work. Such people do not vanish into the air. They land, for the most part, in think tanks and policy shops, which sounds a reasonable enough substitute until you stop to consider what a think tank is actually for. A think tank produces papers for the next budget. It does not produce philosophy for the next generation. It will argue the costing of a policy down to the decimal; it will not sit for twenty years with the prior question of what the policy is finally for.

And so the supply chain broke. The people who ought to have been forging the foundational arguments, testing them against the best opposition they could find, and handing them down in better repair than they received them, simply stopped being made in the places built to make them. A tradition cut off in that way is left to feed on itself, chewing over its inherited arguments without the means to develop them — and, in the worst case, handing its whole intellectual identity over to people who were never trained to think the questions through at all.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to the influencers. I use the word without the sneer it usually carries, because the sneer is lazy and it misses the actual problem. The people who built large followings online around one conservative-adjacent grievance or another are not the villains of this story. They are entrepreneurs, and they found a real market and served it ably. The market was real — that is the thing to hold onto. The unease about vaccine mandates was real. The mistrust of far-off institutions was real. The bone-deep sense that ordinary people were being managed by a class of expert strangers who neither knew nor cared what their lives were actually like was real then and is real now, and I will not pretend otherwise in order to make a tidier point.

But a market is not a philosophy, and a heap of separate anxieties, however genuine each one of them is, does not add up to a political tradition. What became of Canadian conservatism across the social media years is that it slowly turned into a federation of grievances in the place where a coherent idea of how to govern ought to have been. Vaccine resistance, suspicion of Indigenous rights, dread of shadowy institutions abroad, a whole imported wardrobe of American culture-war positions with no natural root in Canadian soil — all of it gathered in under the one conservative banner, not because any of it followed from a shared first principle, but because all of it shared a common enemy in the progressive establishment. The enemy of my enemy became, by slow degrees, the entire definition of the movement. And a movement defined only by what it stands against is not a tradition at all. It is a mood. Moods are real enough while they last, and then they pass, and when they have passed you look around and find they have built nothing a person could actually live in.

The borrowing from America deserves its own hard look, because it is where the sickness shows itself most plainly. American conservatism grew in particular soil, and it is worth naming what was in that soil. A revolutionary founding that bred a deep and permanent suspicion of central government. A large and confident religious population that lent the movement both a moral vocabulary and a ready-built organizational spine. A corporate and financial establishment wealthy enough to fund a rival intellectual world of its own. A frontier myth that happens to fit libertarian economics so snugly that the fit feels native rather than argued for.

We have none of those things, or none of them in the same form. We had no revolution. We have a churchgoing population in long decline that has never had the slightest appetite for the public religiosity that powers so much of American conservative life. We do not have the same corporate base. And our own frontier myth, such as it is, is not a story about the self-made man conquering the wilderness alone; it is a story about survival and mutual dependence, about people getting one another through a hard country and a harder winter, which sits a good deal closer to an older Tory communitarianism than to anything libertarian. So when Canadian conservatives import the American positions whole, they are not adapting a living tradition to local weather. They are pulling on a borrowed suit and standing there genuinely puzzled that it hangs so badly off the shoulders.

And nowhere does that borrowed suit fit worse than on the question of Indigenous rights, which is also, as it happens, the very place where our inheritance and the American one part company most sharply and most meaningfully.

The constitutional architecture this country built in relation to Indigenous peoples is genuinely distinct, and the distinction is not a small one. The treaty process, for all the ways it was botched and dishonoured in the carrying out, began from a premise that Indigenous nations were political bodies with whom the Crown was obliged to make agreements and then to keep them. That premise runs straight through the Royal Proclamation of 1763, through the numbered treaties, and into Section 35 of the Constitution. It is a real legal inheritance, and it acknowledged the political standing of Indigenous nations in a way the American framework never pursued with the same consistency or the same force of law.

The intent built into that architecture was real, even where the execution failed — and it did fail, gravely, in ways whose shadow lies across this country still. But intent bears directly on the question of what the inheritance actually holds, and therefore on what a genuine conservatism in this country is bound to defend. At its better moments the Canadian state understood a treaty to be a solemn institutional commitment, carrying the full weight of the inherited legal order behind it. There is nothing progressive in that understanding. It is the oldest conservative instinct there is, applied to the particular conditions of this place. A promise was made. It binds those who came after. We keep it because we are the kind of people who keep what was solemnly promised — or so we have always told ourselves we are.

What grew up afterward — the reconciliation industry, the ministries and the consultation frameworks, the academic careers built atop Indigenous suffering while the communities themselves slid backward by every measure you could put a number to — betrayed that intent in the very act of claiming to fulfil it. And Canadian conservatism, having let its intellectual foundations rot through, had nothing principled left to stand on from which to name the betrayal for what it was. So it drifted instead, lazily, into treating Indigenous rights as some progressive imposition to be resisted, rather than the conservative inheritance they plainly are. It walked off the very ground that most distinguished it from its American cousin and most firmly tied it to its own first principles. Of all the things this sickness has cost us, I am not certain any is more foolish than that one.

The wider confusion shows itself nowhere more clearly than here in British Columbia, where what went by the name of conservatism for most of living memory was in fact the BC Liberal Party — and that deserves to be said plainly and without flinching. The BC Liberals were not conservatives. They were a coalition of people who did not want the NDP in power, gathered under the banner of free enterprise. And that phrase, free enterprise, did all the work that a political philosophy is supposed to do. Asked what we stand for, it answered with a two-word position on the economy, and said precisely nothing about institutions, nothing about community, nothing about the relation of a person to the order he is born into, nothing about what we owe to the land, or to one another, or to the nations who were here long before any of us arrived.

Free enterprise, taken as a governing philosophy, is not conservatism. It is a preference for one economic arrangement got up in the costume of a first principle. Edmund Burke had nothing to say about free enterprise, and not because he had simply not yet gotten round to it, but because the question he was actually asking sat underneath economics altogether. He wanted to know what holds a society together in the first place, and what makes it worth the holding, and what exactly we are gambling when we set about pulling it apart in the name of some abstract improvement. You cannot answer a question of that order with an opinion about markets. And nobody, across all the long years the free-enterprise coalition held this province, ever truly stopped to ask the question that sits beneath the slogan — what a conservatism rooted in this particular place would actually be for.

A coalition with nothing beneath it but a common enemy cannot, in the end, hold together, and we have lately watched it fail to. The party rebranded itself BC United, as though the trouble had ever been the name, and then in the late summer of 2024, weeks out from an election, its leader stood up and folded the whole century-old enterprise in the middle of the campaign, urging his own voters to go and back the rival he had personally thrown out of his caucus two years before. A party that could claim eight former premiers simply dissolved. When the single thing binding you together is your opposition to the other side, then the moment someone else can carry that opposition more loudly than you, there is no longer any reason for you to exist.

What rushed into the vacuum was the BC Conservative Party, and I want to be fair about what that was and what it was not. It was not the arrival of a serious conservatism resting on solid ground. It was a surge, and surges run on feeling. The party had been a fringe concern with barely a seat to its name until a man expelled from the establishment party’s own caucus wandered across, took up its leadership almost by accident, and found himself lifted upward on a rising tide of grievance against the New Democrats that he had done next to nothing to build. I do not say that to be unkind to the man. I say it because it matters. A movement that arrives in the world that way owes everything to the mood that carried it and nothing to any idea, and a movement in that position will reach, every single time, for more of the mood. More grievance. Tougher talk. Another red line drawn brighter than the last. It mistakes the volume of its anger for the depth of its foundations.

It is worth pausing here over Michael Oakeshott, who understood the conservative temperament better than almost anyone writing in the last century, and who would have recognized that reflex on sight. Conservatism, Oakeshott argued in the nineteen-fifties, is not really an ideology at all. It is a disposition — a settled preference for the familiar over the unknown, the tried over the untried, the actual over the merely possible, present laughter over utopian bliss. To be conservative, on his account, is simply to prefer to keep and to enjoy what one already has rather than to stake it all on a promise. And he was right, in his own time and on his own terms. But the disposition carries a quiet assumption folded up inside it, one he was honest enough to name out loud: it suits, he said, a man who is aware of having something to lose that he has learned to care for. The whole posture rests on the present being worth conserving in the first place.

That is precisely the assumption that has come apart in our own time. While the institutions still served the people, to conserve them was simple wisdom — but the institutions did not hold still. The radical project Oakeshott’s disposition was built to resist did not wait politely outside the walls to be let in; it moved in, took up residence, and shifted the whole society’s sense of what is normal beneath everyone’s feet. And in a world arranged like that, the bare disposition to conserve no longer conserves anything worth the keeping. It stands guard over the very capture it was built to prevent.

Oakeshott, to his lasting credit, left the door open to exactly this. Even the workman most attached to his familiar tools, he allowed, will now and again find that one has failed past mending — and then there is a time and a place to be radical about replacing it. We are living in such a time. And it means the genuinely conservative answer to this moment is not the one the grievance machine keeps reaching for. It is not more mood, not louder rhetoric, not another red line scored into the sand. All of that is only the old disposition thrashing at a present that has already slipped its grasp. The genuinely conservative answer is to go down beneath the captured surface of things, all the way to the bedrock — the Burkean rock, the oldest principles we possess, the ones concerning inheritance and obligation and the partnership of the generations — and from there to build patiently back upward, out of the real conditions of this land and the people who actually live on it. I have tried to begin sketching what a conservatism native to this coast might look like elsewhere, and I will not lay the whole of it out again here. But that, in the end, is the work in front of us. Not reaction. Reconstruction.

George Grant saw the larger drift coming a long way off. His Lament for a Nation, published in 1965, mourned the surrender of English Canada’s Tory strain to a continentalism that served neither tradition nor community but only capital and convenience. Grant was not writing about branding, and he was certainly not writing about anything so small as social media. He was writing about something far deeper and far slower: the quiet giving-up of a political inheritance that had once understood a society to be more than an economic arrangement, that had taken community to be something prior to the market and more important than it, and that had held the state to owe its people obligations which could not be discharged by the simple expedient of getting out of the way of commerce.

That inheritance had always kept room in it for the dignity of ordinary labour, because it understood, correctly, that a society indifferent to the condition of its working people was not in fact conserving anything worth the name. Disraeli built his One Nation conservatism on exactly that recognition in the nineteenth century. His point was never that the welfare of working people was a progressive concern to be handed across the aisle to the left. His point was that a conservatism careless of the lives of ordinary people was morally hollow at the centre and, in the longer run, quietly suicidal. A nation is not its gross domestic product. A nation is its people, living particular lives in particular communities, shaped by inheritances that belong to all of them in common. To conserve a nation in any sense worth the breath it takes to say the word, you have to conserve the conditions under which those lives can be lived with some measure of dignity.

And here is the part I am most sure of: that tradition is still here. It did not die. It was crowded out, elbowed into the corners, shouted down by imported grievances and online entrepreneurs and think-tank papers that mistake a clever tactical position for a deep idea. But it can be recovered, precisely because it is rooted in something true about this country and this coast and the actual conditions of living here.

What would recovering it look like, in plain practice? It would look like taking the legislature seriously again as the place where the real political questions of this province are meant to be settled, instead of farming them out to the courts and to ministerial discretion and to an endless apparatus of consultation. It would look like bringing Indigenous nations into that legislature directly — not as a concession handed across to progressivism, but as the long-overdue fulfilment of a conservative inheritance that always understood treaty relationships to be binding political obligations. It would look like a politics rooted in the particular facts of this coast: the land and the fisheries, the resource towns, the cities grown crowded and dear, and the ordinary people in all of them who simply want the province to work and have been waiting a very long time for someone to try in earnest. And it would look like taking the word conservative back from the people who hollowed it out, and insisting, without apology, that the thing it once pointed to is worth the recovering.

The diagnosis has to come first. Every honest treatment begins with an honest account of what went wrong and why, and that account is uncomfortable here precisely because it asks the patient to look hard at himself rather than at his enemies. Canadian conservatism has enemies, and some of them are worth naming, and they will be named in their turn. But the deepest wound was self-inflicted. The inheritance was real. It was given up. And whether it can be recovered is, to my mind, very nearly the most important political question this province and this country have in front of them, even if hardly anyone has yet thought to put it in those terms.

And if the universities have been hollowed out — that is a real loss, but it is not the end of the matter, because a serious mind was never the private property of a faculty lounge. Good minds and cooler heads turn up everywhere, in workshops and wheelhouses and ordinary working lives, anywhere people have had to think hard about real things and live with the consequences of getting them wrong. The rebuilding does not get to wait on the institutions coming back to their senses. It falls to us to begin it ourselves, where we stand and with what we have in hand — and to seek out the people already doing the serious thinking, the ones bringing a real foundation to what they believe rather than borrowing a mood, and to make common cause with them. The supply chain that broke can be built again, and there is no law anywhere that says it has to be rebuilt in the same places it was torn down.

That is the question this project means to take up. Not with a mood, and not with a grievance, and not with a template borrowed wholesale from someone else’s country, but with a genuine reckoning with what was lost, and a serious proposal for what getting it back would actually require.

That conversation continues here.

In 1969 Pierre Trudeau’s government released a White Paper on Indian Policy. It proposed to abolish Indian status, dismantle the Indian Act, and fold Indigenous peoples into Canadian citizenship as formal equals under the law. The intention, stated plainly, was assimilation, though the word was avoided. Come inside the institutions. Become Canadians like everyone else. The distinctions that have caused so much difficulty will simply cease to exist.

Indigenous leaders rejected it immediately and forcefully. Harold Cardinal’s response, Citizens Plus, became the founding document of the modern Indigenous rights movement in Canada. The rejection was understandable. The White Paper offered to dismantle the existing framework, racist and paternalistic as it was, without replacing it with anything structurally equivalent or better. It was subtraction without addition. Take away the Indian Act, which for all its failures at least acknowledged a distinct legal relationship and set of rights, and offer in exchange formal equality with no material or political mechanism behind it.

That is not a deal. That is a dispossession dressed in liberal language.

But something important happened in the wake of that rejection that has never been examined honestly. The doctrine that hardened out of it, that Indigenous peoples must remain structurally outside provincial and federal institutions to preserve their sovereignty, has served the progressive political class better than it has served the communities it claimed to protect. Fifty-six years later, First Nations life expectancy in BC has fallen to 67.2 years against 82 for non-Indigenous residents. Forty percent of BC’s homeless population is Indigenous despite being six percent of the census population. The clean water advisories, the income gaps, the incarceration rates: none of it has improved in any meaningful way through fifty years of consultation, conference, and aspirational legislation.

The doctrine that kept Indigenous peoples outside the institutions did not preserve their sovereignty. It preserved the professional class built around the permanent negotiating position. Those are not the same thing.

Here is what the White Paper should have been.

Not the elimination of distinct legal status without replacement. Not assimilation dressed as equality. A genuine exchange: the dismantling of the racist architecture of the Indian Act in return for guaranteed seats at the table where decisions about Indigenous lives are actually made. Representation proportional to population. Selection of representatives determined entirely by the nations themselves. Historical grievances handled by a dedicated tribunal with real authority to settle them with finality. Forward governance handled by the legislature with Indigenous voices guaranteed inside it.

That offer was never made. It needed to be made then. It needs to be made now.

The template existed in 1969. It had existed since 1867. New Zealand had created Māori seats in its parliament that year, four dedicated seats for Māori representation in a Westminster parliamentary system culturally and legally similar to Canada’s. The Waitangi Tribunal would follow in 1975, six years after Trudeau’s White Paper, providing exactly the dedicated mechanism for settling historical grievances that Canada chose not to build. New Zealand took the fork in the road that Canada saw and drove past.

One hundred and fifty-seven years later the Māori seats still exist. The Waitangi Tribunal still operates. Māori political identity is stronger, not weaker, for having representation inside the institutions. The Māori Party operates as a distinctly Māori political institution within the Westminster system. It has not been absorbed into the two-party structure. It has used parliamentary presence to advance Māori interests including treaty settlements and language revitalization. Presence expanded sovereignty rather than diminishing it.

What is worth knowing is that the Māori seats were not introduced as a permanent fixture. They were introduced in 1867 as a temporary measure, intended to last five years while the political situation settled. They became permanent because they worked. Because the people they were designed to serve found them worth keeping. Because presence inside the institution produced results that absence never had.

That history is directly relevant to what BC should do now and how it should do it.

Trust between Indigenous and non-Indigenous British Columbians has been eroded by decades of broken promises, failed legislation, and political theatre performed in place of structural change. Introducing designated seats as a two or three term provisional measure, subject to honest assessment of whether they are genuinely serving the communities they were designed to serve, is not a concession to that distrust. It is an honest acknowledgment of it. It says we are not asking you to trust us. We are asking you to try this with us and tell us plainly whether it is working. If it works, it stays. If it needs adjustment, we adjust. If the communities it serves decide it has failed them, the conversation continues from a position of actual experience rather than theoretical debate.

This is how serious structural change survives political transition. Not by being imposed permanently from the outset and defended against every objection, but by being introduced humbly, assessed honestly, and made permanent by the demonstrated will of the people it serves. New Zealand did not design its Māori seats to last forever. They lasted forever because they earned it.

The instinctive response to this comparison is to reach for the assimilation objection. Entering Westminster institutions means accepting their authority. Representation becomes absorption. The colonizer’s framework doesn’t change and Indigenous peoples are simply invited inside on terms the colonizer sets.

This objection deserves a direct answer rather than a dismissal because it contains real historical grounding. Every previous attempt to bring Indigenous peoples into Canadian institutions has carried embedded assumptions about how that participation would look, what form it would take, what legitimacy structure would underpin it. That is where the colonial imposition actually lives, not necessarily in the institution itself but in the insistence that participation conform to the dominant culture’s procedural norms.

The proposal under discussion is different in a way that matters fundamentally.

The seats exist. How they are filled is entirely the nations’ business.

That sentence does more work than it appears to. It separates the question of access from the question of governance. The legislature provides the room. The nations decide who sits in it, on what basis, according to what internal process their own traditions and governance structures determine. A Westminster institution provides the forum. Indigenous governance provides the representatives. Those are two entirely different things operating simultaneously without either subordinating the other.

It goes further. In its most developed form the seats need not be filled by a single fixed representative. They could rotate based on the issue being debated. If a piece of legislation impacts one nation more directly than others the seats could be filled by representatives from that nation. If the matter is provincial in scope the representatives could come from a broader body the nations themselves constitute for exactly that purpose. The only requirements are that the seats be filled, that they be used, and that the Indigenous population of BC is satisfied with the representation it is receiving. The nations still retain the right to vote in whatever riding they live in, their residential political participation unchanged, their national political voice finally guaranteed.

Some will call this double representation. It is not. It is the recognition that Indigenous political identity is not primarily geographic in the settler sense. It is national, historical, and relational in ways that a riding vote simply cannot capture. What the proposal addresses is not double representation but double subjugation without representation: the condition of being governed by institutions you have no guaranteed voice in while your own governance structures operate in parallel without institutional leverage over the decisions that most affect your communities.

The decisions don’t stop because Indigenous peoples aren’t in the room. The BC Legislature legislates regardless. Budgets that determine housing, health, and clean water on reserves are set regardless. The question has never been whether Westminster institutions will govern Indigenous lives. They do and they will and this will never change. The question is whether the people most affected will have a guaranteed voice in the process.

The White Paper got the destination partly right and the vehicle catastrophically wrong. It wanted Indigenous peoples inside the institutions. The mistake was demanding they surrender their distinctiveness to get there and offering nothing structural in exchange. The offer being made here demands nothing of the kind. Bring your governance traditions, your internal processes, your own determination of legitimate representation. The legislature will make room for whatever form that takes.

What Harold Cardinal was actually arguing in Citizens Plus, though the doctrine that hardened around his rejection of the White Paper obscured it, was not permanent external sovereignty as an end in itself. It was that Indigenous peoples were citizens plus: full participants in Canadian political life with the additional rights and distinct status their history and prior occupation of the land entitled them to. Citizens plus is exactly what guaranteed legislative seats with nation-controlled selection delivers. Not citizens instead. Not a separate political order that happens to share a geography. Citizens of the province with their own distinct national standing guaranteed inside the institutions of the province.

British Columbia is not a passive observer of this failure. It is the most urgent jurisdiction in the country to address it and the one best positioned to do so right now.

No province has a larger unresolved treaty gap. Most of BC was never formally ceded. The land question is not a historical abstraction here, it is a live legal and political reality that DRIPA attempted to address through aspirational language and produced instead a crisis of legal uncertainty that is still unresolved. The crisis is real. The political window it has opened is also real, and it will not stay open indefinitely.

BC also has something that makes the structural change being proposed considerably more achievable than it would be at the federal level. A unicameral legislature. One chamber. No Senate to navigate, no second house to bring along, no constitutional amendment required to add dedicated seats proportional to Indigenous population. The BC Legislative Assembly can do this on its own authority. The mechanism is simpler here than at the federal level.

This matters because the usual objection to serious structural proposals is complexity. Too many moving parts. Too many approvals required. Too many opportunities for the political class to run out the clock while appearing to engage seriously. That objection does not apply here. BC can move. BC has every reason to move. And if BC moves, it does something that has never been done in this country’s history: it demonstrates that a Westminster parliamentary system in Canada can make genuine room for Indigenous representation inside its institutions rather than managing Indigenous peoples permanently outside them.

That is not a small thing. That is a model for every other province and ultimately for the federal parliament watching from Ottawa. British Columbia, the province with the largest unresolved treaty gap and the most acute Indigenous representation crisis, becomes the province that solved it first. That is something to carry with genuine pride for the rest of our existence as a political community. Not performative pride. The kind that comes from having actually done something hard and done it right.

Now look at who is supposed to be solving this in 2026.

The BC Conservative leadership candidates have all called for repeal of DRIPA. Every single one. Repeal is not a policy. It is a bumper sticker. It tells the anxious settler base what it wants to hear without offering Indigenous communities or non-Indigenous communities anything structurally different from what existed before DRIPA, which was already failing by every measurable indicator before the ink dried on the legislation. Repeal returns British Columbia to the condition that made DRIPA politically possible in the first place. It solves nothing. It names nothing. It offers nothing. It is the sound a political party makes when it has decided the base matters more than the problem.

The BCNDP is worse, because they actually had the courage of their stated convictions once and then ran from it as fast as their legs would carry them.

In 2018 David Eby, then Attorney General, released a report on electoral reform that included a specific recommendation: that a legislative committee be appointed to examine creating dedicated Indigenous seats in the BC Legislative Assembly. His recommendation. On government letterhead. The committee was never appointed. The seats were never examined. Eby moved on to other files and the recommendation was quietly filed with every other serious idea the progressive political class has produced and then abandoned the moment it required something beyond a press release.

Eby became Premier in 2022. He passed DRIPA and called it a new day for reconciliation. When the courts began taking DRIPA seriously, when the legal uncertainty it generated started threatening his one-seat majority, he moved to suspend the very legislation he had championed. An Indigenous MLA in his own caucus said she could not support it. He backed down. He called the episode the most challenging issue he had worked on in government.

The most challenging issue. For him.

The man who once recommended Indigenous seats in the legislature, who passed DRIPA in celebration, who tried to suspend Indigenous rights legislation in a confidence vote, found the experience challenging. The communities that have been waiting for clean water since before Eby entered politics are presumably finding their own experience challenging as well, though nobody in the legislature has been asked to speak to that directly because they have no guaranteed seat from which to do it.

This is what progressive reconciliation looks like when the rubber meets the road. It looks like a unanimous vote and a celebratory press release followed by a quiet suspension motion when the costs arrive. It looks like a recommendation for Indigenous seats that never becomes a committee. It looks like fifty-six years of frameworks, strategies, calls to action, and aspirational legislation that have collectively produced a life expectancy gap of fifteen years and a homelessness ratio of seven to one.

The progressive political class did not fail Indigenous peoples despite their commitment to reconciliation. The commitment was always to the performance of reconciliation, which is a different thing entirely. Performance generates goodwill, votes, grant applications, and academic careers. Performance does not generate clean water or guaranteed seats at the table where the decisions are made. When performance became structurally expensive, Eby reached for the suspension motion. When the performance became politically inconvenient, every Conservative candidate reached for repeal. Both moves reveal the same truth: neither party was ever willing to do the one thing that would make the performance unnecessary.

Neither party has looked at the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations sitting eleven minutes from the legislature, on territory that was here before the legislature, that will be here after every current politician has been forgotten, and asked why the people most affected by the decisions made in that building have no guaranteed seat inside it.

A child born in a BC Indigenous community the year the White Paper was rejected is in their mid-fifties now. They have lived their entire adult life inside fifty-six years of managed failure that followed the rejection of one inadequate offer with nothing adequate in its place. They are not waiting for another conference. They are not waiting for another framework. They are waiting for someone to make the actual offer.

The Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand was built to settle historical grievances with finality, converting historical relationship into present political and economic reality through enforceable decisions. The Māori seats were built to guarantee that the people governing New Zealand included the people whose ancestors had governed it before anyone else. Together they constitute the offer Canada should have made in 1969 and still has not made.

The scars of what was done will not disappear with any policy. They are permanent. The goal is not erasure of history but a functional present and future built honestly on top of it. The Māori experience is not without ongoing tension, ongoing inequity, ongoing argument about whether the model has delivered enough. Those tensions are not evidence that the model fails. They are evidence that it works, because the Māori have the standing and the voice to have those arguments inside institutions that take them seriously. Bilateral dissatisfaction in a democracy means the system is making real tradeoffs rather than just performing them. When nobody is unhappy it means nothing consequential is happening.

Nothing consequential has been happening in BC for fifty-six years.

Make the offer. Build the tribunal. Expand the legislature. Let the nations decide who fills the seats and trust that the governance capacity to fill them has been there all along, not created by settler generosity but freed from settler obstruction.

That is not assimilation. That is what the social contract looks like when it is finally extended honestly to everyone living inside it.

The offer was never made in 1969. The only question left is whether anyone has the courage to make it now.

I want to try to name something. I am not sure I can do it precisely and I am not sure the naming is finished, but I think it needs to begin somewhere and it might as well begin here.

The navy brought me west. I arrived the way sailors arrive, dropped into a place by an institution larger than yourself, expecting to pass through, and then the coast got into you before you noticed it happening. The mountains coming down to the water diving into deep, ancient fjords. The old growth pressing in at the edges of everything casting historical shadows over new development below. The Indigenous place names on every inlet and passage, naming a geography that was fully known and governed long before anyone with my surname arrived. I fell in love with it immediately. I fell in love with the people. And I stayed.

What I found here was an older conservatism than I hadn’t had a name for at the time. Not the tax-cut conservatism of the think tanks. Not the culture-war conservatism imported from American cable news. Something more practical and more demanding, inherited knowledge about how to live well in hard country with the people around you, across difference, without waiting for someone above you to sort it out.

I have been trying to understand for some time why that conservatism has no home in Canadian or British Columbian political life. And I think I am beginning to see why.

The problem is that we have let politicians define modern conservatism.

That is not their job and they are not suited to it. A politician’s primary obligation is winning. Not thinking. Not building. Not preserving. Winning the next election, which means simplifying every argument until it fits on a lawn sign, means speaking to the anxious centre, means sanding every hard edge off every difficult idea until what remains is smooth enough that no one can object to it, which also means no one can be moved by it.

This is not a criticism of politicians as people. It is a description of the incentive structure they operate inside. You cannot ask a person whose survival depends on winning a popularity contest to also be the custodian of a serious intellectual tradition. The two jobs are in fundamental tension.

What should be doing that work, the universities, the intellectual class, the serious journals of conservative thought, has largely abdicated. The academy in Canada has moved so thoroughly into progressive and soft-Marxist frameworks that a student today can complete a graduate degree in political science or history without ever seriously engaging with Burke or Oakeshott or the tradition of classical liberal thought that built the institutions they are studying. Conservative intellectual life has been pushed to the margins of Canadian academic culture and what replaced it in the mainstream did not serve the working person. It served the professional. The credentialed. The comfortable. The people who had already arrived.

The vacuum that created is not being filled by wisdom. It is being filled by noise. The social media influencer who chases engagement and calls it political commentary. The podcast host who packages grievance as philosophy. The leadership candidate who mistakes a list of tax cuts for a governing vision. These are not the same thing as a political tradition. They are the performance of one.

And a party without a serious intellectual foundation is a party waiting to be captured. By whoever organizes first. By whoever writes the biggest cheque. By whoever shows up with a coherent story, however thin that story actually is, when the movement is hungry enough to accept anything that sounds like direction.

This is not hypothetical. It is happening.

Canadian conservatism has always had regional flavours and it matters to understand them because none of them quite fit what I am trying to describe.

Prairie populism is real and powerful and it draws on genuine grievance, the feeling that the centre of the country extracts from the periphery, that eastern institutions do not understand or care about western life, that the people who work the land are invisible to the people who govern it. That feeling is not wrong. But populism as a political mode tends toward destruction rather than construction. It knows what it is against better than what it is for. It distrusts institutions rather than working to reform them. On its best days it is democratic energy that keeps elites honest. On its worst days it is a wrecking ball with no blueprint for what to build in the rubble.

The corporate conservatism of central Canada — Bay Street and rue Saint-Jacques, the think tanks, the business councils — is managerial and primarily interested in stable conditions for capital. It is not without intelligence. But it has no working class in it. It has no land in it. It speaks to the boardroom and the policy conference and it mistakes those rooms for the country. When it looks at a resource community or an Indigenous nation it sees an asset to be optimized or a liability to be managed. It does not see people with legitimate claims on the institutions that govern them.

Maritime conservatism is the closest cousin to what I am reaching for. It has the community rootedness, the practical instinct, the distrust of grand ideological projects. But it operates in a different geography with different history. The specific tensions of this coast, the land question, the resource economy, the Indigenous title, the particular working class that has grown here, are not its tensions.

None of them quite produce what this coast actually needs.

The working class in British Columbia is not a manufacturing class. We do not have the factory towns of Ontario or the old mill towns of Quebec. Our working class is on and in the land. Miners, forestry workers, fishermen, truck drivers, the people who extract and move the physical substance of this province. That work builds a specific relationship with the natural world, not romantic, not ideological, but practical and intimate and honest in ways that no policy paper can replicate.

A fisherman knows what the salmon run means not because they read a report but because their livelihood depends on it and their father’s did before him. A forestry worker knows what a clearcut does to a watershed not from a university lecture but from watching what happens to the streams afterward, watching the erosion, watching what comes back and what doesn’t and how long it takes. A miner knows the land the way surgeons know bodies — from the inside, with attention to consequences.

This is where the environmental argument actually lives, and it is a conservative argument, not a progressive one. Edmund Burke’s definition of society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn is an environmental argument as much as a political one. You do not consume the inheritance. You tend it. You pass it forward. Conserve is literally in the name.

Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative and he built the US national parks system not despite his conservatism but because of it. The land was worth preserving because it belonged to the permanent things, the things a serious civilization protects precisely because they cannot be replaced once they are gone. The old growth forests of this coast. The salmon runs. The coastal ecosystems that sustained life here for thousands of years before anyone thought to call it British Columbia. These are inheritance. A conservatism that treats them as resources to be extracted until exhausted is not conservatism. It is liquidation dressed in conservative language.

The modern right’s hostility to environmental thinking is not rooted in conservative philosophy. It is rooted in the specific alliance between conservative parties and extractive industries that produces short term political returns at the cost of the permanent things. It was imported from American Republican politics and it has colonized Canadian conservative thinking in ways that have cost us both credibility and coherence. There is no philosophical obligation to it. A conservatism serious about stewardship sheds it without apology.

And then there is the question this coast cannot avoid, the one that every other flavour of Canadian conservatism has found ways to sidestep or defer or manage without resolving.

The land question. Indigenous title. The nations that were here before the provinces existed, whose governance of these lands and waters produced the salmon runs and the coastal ecosystems that the working class of British Columbia depends on for its livelihood to this day.

I will not pretend to have all of this worked out. What I will say is that I find the way the current conservative conversation approaches this question, as a regulatory burden to be reduced, as an obstacle to permitting timelines to be cleared, as an inconvenient legacy requiring a clean repeal and a moving on, to be both philosophically inadequate and practically foolish.

Philosophically inadequate because classical conservatism is built on the legitimacy of inherited rights and long standing claims. Burke’s entire project was to defend what had been earned and established against revolutionary disruption. A conservatism that applies that principle selectively, defending property rights and constitutional order for settlers while treating Indigenous title as an irritant, is not applying a principle at all. It is applying a preference and calling it a principle.

Practically foolish because the land question does not go away because you stop talking about it. It accumulates. The communities fall further behind by every measurable indicator. The legal claims get stronger, not weaker. The political instability grows. You repeal DRIPA today and you have solved exactly nothing. You have removed an inadequate framework without building anything real in its place and you have sent a message to the nations most connected to the lands and waters this working class depends on that they are not partners, they are problems.

I believe Indigenous nations should have guaranteed seats in the legislature. Not as a favour. Not as reconciliation theatre. As the structural recognition that they are governing peoples with a legitimate claim on the institutions that exercise authority over their territories. New Zealand has operated this way for 157 years inside the same Westminster parliamentary tradition we inherited. It produces real political partnership between peoples who share a country. The haka is performed in the New Zealand parliament. That is what genuine inclusion over generations actually looks like in a culture. We have nothing like it and the absence is visible.

The through line connecting all of this, the stewardship of land, the dignity of working people, the environmental inheritance we are obligated to protect, the legitimate claims of Indigenous nations, the supremacy of parliament as the place where these questions get resolved rather than endlessly deferred to courts and consultation frameworks, is classical liberal thinking extended honestly into the conditions of this coast in this century.

Locke believed in the right of people to the product of their labour and the land they work. Burke believed in the obligation to preserve and transmit inherited value. Macdonald — for all his considerable failures and the weight of what those failures cost Indigenous peoples — understood that building a nation required institutions large enough to hold everyone. Diefenbaker gave status Indians the vote in 1960 not because it was popular but because his understanding of the social contract would not permit their exclusion. These are the intellectual ancestors of the tradition I am trying to describe.

I am calling it west coast conservatism because that is what it is. Shaped by this geography, grounded in this history, honest about these specific tensions. Not imported. Not franchised. Not assembled from the anxieties of a different coast and a different class of people with different problems. Something that starts from the land and the people who live on it and the obligations that come with both.

I am a sailor who left his own family and land to come west, and I’ve never left. My family is here now and this is my land today. I have no credentials and no institutional affiliation and I do not have all of this fully worked out.

What I have is a conviction that the thing I am describing is real and that it is missing and that its absence is costing us something we may not easily recover.

If you recognize any of this — if something in here sounds like what you have been trying to say and couldn’t quite find the words for — then pull up a chair.

This conversation is just beginning.

There is a word for what has happened to Indigenous peoples in British Columbia over the past fifty years. The word is not reconciliation. The word is not decolonization. The word is not nation-to-nation. Those are the words the progressive political class chose, chosen for their capacity to signal virtue while committing to nothing, deployable at the opening of a meeting and forgotten before the coffee was cold.

The word is abandonment. Dressed up in the language of respect. Institutionalized, funded, credentialed, and made comfortable for everyone except the people it was supposed to serve.

The preceding three pieces established the evidence. This one draws the conclusion.

There is a class of people in BC whose professional existence depends on this problem remaining unsolved. Politicians of both parties who use Indigenous issues as performance rather than responsibility. Consultants who bill governments for navigating a consultation process they helped design. Academics who publish papers about decolonizing institutional spaces from the security of tenured positions in those same institutions. Indigenous political organizations whose leadership has built careers on the premise that their communities must remain outside the institutions where decisions are made.

They do not agree on much but they all agree on this: the current arrangement must continue.

The BCNDP uses it to perform progressive values without the accountability of structural change. In 2018, then-Attorney General David Eby released his report on electoral reform. Buried in the recommendations, under the heading Indigenous Representation, was this: that regardless of the referendum outcome, a legislative committee be appointed to examine creating one or more designated seats for Indigenous people in the BC Legislative Assembly. His recommendation. On government letterhead.

No committee was appointed. No seats were examined.

Eby became Premier in 2022 and spent the next four years managing the consequences of DRIPA — the same act he helped pass with assurances it was purely aspirational — until the courts took it seriously and his one-seat majority came under threat. The man who once recommended Indigenous seats in the legislature tried to suspend Indigenous rights legislation in a confidence vote, backed down when an Indigenous MLA in his own caucus said she could not support it, and called the whole episode the most challenging issue he had worked on in government.

DRIPA passed unanimously in celebration and is being suspended in panic. Neither position required actually giving Indigenous peoples a permanent seat at the table. Consultation is the preferred mechanism because consultation can always be done again. Representation cannot be undone.

The progressive political class does not abandon its principles under pressure. It reveals that it never held them.

The BC Conservatives use it as a wedge. Legal uncertainty. Court decisions framed as threats. An anxious base. Every year this remains unresolved is another year the problem can be called too dangerous to fix. Calling for full repeal of DRIPA is not a policy. It is a fundraising letter.

The consultant and academic class uses it as a livelihood. The duty to consult has generated an industry. Reconciliation frameworks have generated careers. The Calls to Action have generated conferences. None of it has generated a functioning answer to how Indigenous and non-Indigenous British Columbians govern themselves together. That is not a coincidence. An answer would end the billable hours.

And the established Indigenous political leadership — this will generate pushback and needs to be said anyway — has made the current arrangement survivable for those at the top. This is not an accusation of bad faith against every Indigenous leader in BC. It is an observation about incentive structures that applies to every political class in every society: the people at the top have interests in the system’s continuation that are not always identical to the interests of the people at the bottom. The communities waiting for clean water are not the same as the organizations billing governments for representing them.

The established political class calls this a progressive cause. They are wrong about that too. The case for Indigenous representation in BC is not a progressive reconciliation argument. It is a classical conservative one, and the distinction matters.

Thomas Hobbes understood that life outside the social contract is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Human beings accept the constraints of political society because they reason their way to it. John Locke grounded political legitimacy in consent: rights precede the state, government derives its authority from the governed. Edmund Burke added the generational dimension: institutions that have calcified into vehicles for the few at the expense of the many have forfeited the conservative’s loyalty.

What does this tradition say about fifty years of managed exclusion for Indigenous peoples from the institutions of political society? It says that is not a conservative position. It is a failure of the social contract. It says that property rights, which Locke treated as foundational, cannot be selectively applied. Aboriginal title is not a radical question. It is a property rights question. Who owns what, on what basis, with what protections? Conservative philosophy is built to answer that and has consistently refused to in this context because answering honestly requires confronting what was taken and from whom.

The conservative remedy for institutional failure is not more of the same institution. It is structural reform that returns power to individuals and communities rather than concentrating it in the hands of the apparatus that failed them.

The established Indigenous political position, self-government outside provincial institutions with UNDRIP as foundation, deserves a direct response rather than a dismissal. Given what those institutions have done, the instinct to reject them is understandable. However, it does not survive scrutiny.

UNDRIP is an international human rights instrument. Human rights instruments are grounded in the same Enlightenment tradition that produced the social contract. They assume the existence of states and legal frameworks within which rights can be claimed and enforced. Article 18 of UNDRIP states explicitly that Indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decision-making in matters which affect their rights. Participate in decision-making. That is the language of representation, not permanent external sovereignty or a refusal to engage with existing governance structures.

The position that Indigenous peoples must remain outside provincial governance to preserve their sovereignty is not supported by UNDRIP. It is not supported by the Tsilhqot’in or Cowichan decisions, which established title within the existing legal order rather than outside it. It is not supported by the Māori experience in New Zealand, which demonstrates that entering institutions expands sovereignty rather than diminishing it. What it is supported by is the professional interest of the progressive political class in keeping the question permanently open. An open question generates fees, panels, billings, and wedges. A settled question generates accountability and true reconciliation. Not only reconciling our own past injustices toward Indigenous peoples as settled but also reconciling our existing governance structures to the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples which predate those structures.

The life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous British Columbians is approximately ten years. The income gap runs to tens of thousands of dollars annually. The gaps in housing, clean water, education, and incarceration rates are not relics of a distant era. They are current. They are being produced right now by decisions the political class is making right now. And no amount of action from the progressive political class has brought real results to close those gaps; they have only widened, in fact.

Every year that the BCNDP performs consultation instead of delivering representation, communities pay that cost. Every year that the Conservatives use title uncertainty as a wedge rather than a problem to solve, communities pay that cost. Every year the consultant apparatus bills another invoice and the academic class holds another conference, communities pay that cost. Every year established Indigenous political organizations prioritize the sovereignty of the negotiating position over the material needs of the people they represent, communities pay that cost.

The political class does not pay. It only collects.

Dedicated Indigenous seats in the BC Legislative Assembly. A BC Waitangi-like Tribunal to settle historical grievances with finality. Replacement of DRIPA with legislation that delivers permanent structural voice rather than aspirational language that politicians invoke when convenient and abandon when costly. This is what a functioning social contract looks like when extended honestly to everyone living inside it. It is what Locke would recognize. It is what Burke would recognize: not the tearing down of institutions but the reform of institutions that have demonstrably failed their purpose.

The progressive political class will call it assimilation. They will call it a threat to sovereignty. They will hold another conference about it and bill the Crown for attending.

Let them say it in public. Let British Columbians see clearly who is committed to the communities waiting for clean water and who is committed to the arrangement that has kept Indigenous communities waiting for results while the progressive political class has enriched themselves on a permanent state of grievance.

They brought hard times. They have been bringing them for fifty years. And they do not — not a single one of them — know what hard times actually feel like.

It’s time to end hard times.

I am a bus driver. I am not an economist, not a financial analyst, not a policy researcher with letters after my name — except my CD issued after 15 years of service as a Maritime Warfare Officer in the RCN. What I am is a person who pays attention, who reads the public accounts, who has spent some evenings going through the actual numbers that governments publish and that most people never look at. I am not qualified to tell you what the textbooks say. I am qualified to tell you what the numbers say.

I want to be clear about that at the outset, because what follows is going to make Iain Black’s 20 percent personal income tax cut look like one of the most reckless fiscal proposals put forward by a BC Conservative leadership candidate in a generation. And if I can arrive at that conclusion sitting at a kitchen table with public documents and a calculator, imagine what a real economist does with it when Black is standing in front of cameras running for Premier. I am offering the rough draft. The professional demolition comes later.

So. What is Black proposing, and how has he defended it?

His five-point plan lists the 20 percent personal income tax cut as item one, described as a magnet for investment, a driver of job growth, and a tool for affordability. Every bracket. Every earner. Day one. His defence rests on three pillars: the economy grows when you cut taxes, the growth replaces much of the lost revenue, and the remainder can be covered by finding efficiencies — approximately three percent of government revenue, by his accounting. He has pointed to Gordon Campbell’s 2001 cuts as the historical proof of concept. What some might call basic economics.

I want to examine every one of those pillars. But first, the financial picture Black would be inheriting, a picture made significantly worse by eight years of reckless BC NDP fiscal management, and one that demands more discipline from its next steward, not less.

BC’s total consolidated revenue in 2024/25 came in at $84 billion. Of that, $49.4 billion was taxation. Personal income tax alone generated just over $17 billion. Corporate income tax contributed $8.3 billion. On the spending side, provincial operating expenses ran to $91.4 billion. The deficit for 2024/25 was $7.3 billion — lower than forecast, but still $7.3 billion more spent than collected. The current year deficit is projected at $9.6 billion. Next year’s is forecast at $13.3 billion — the largest in provincial history. Taxpayer-supported debt now sits at $99 billion and is projected to climb toward $189 billion over the next three fiscal years.

Servicing that debt already costs $4.4 billion per year. More than BC spends on child welfare. RBC projects debt-servicing costs rising from 4.3 cents per dollar of revenue today to 6.9 cents by 2027/28. TD Economics puts the outer-year interest bill at $8.7 billion annually — money that is gone before a single teacher is hired, a single hospital bed is funded, a single road is expanded or fixed.

This is the house Black wants to renovate by removing a load-bearing wall.

A 20 percent cut to personal income tax rates produces, arithmetically, a 20 percent reduction in personal income tax revenue. Against $17 billion in personal income tax receipts, that is a $3.4 billion reduction. Black calls it three percent of government revenue, which is only true if you use the full $84 billion consolidated figure as your denominator. Use total taxation revenue of $49.4 billion instead and it becomes 6.9 percent. The denominator he chose is the one that makes the number look smallest. Against the existing $9.6 billion deficit he would walk into on day one, it is an extra 35 percent of the shortfall he says he intends to shrink through economic growth. It is like digging an extra third deeper into a hole you promised to start filling.

And here is the comparison that stopped me cold when I worked it out.

BC spends approximately $3.5 billion per year providing income and disability assistance to roughly 253,000 British Columbians — people receiving financial support, transportation help, crisis supplements, and health supports. People who, without that program, have nowhere else to go. The revenue Black proposes to voluntarily surrender is essentially identical in size to what it costs to run that program entirely.

He is not proposing to eliminate income and disability assistance. No doubt he would insist on making that clear. But he is proposing to remove from the provincial treasury, permanently, on day one, a sum of money equal to what it costs to keep 253,000 of the most vulnerable people in this province from falling through the floor. He cannot do both things. He cannot cut $3.4 billion in annual revenue and protect every service that depends on it. One of those commitments is false. He has not told British Columbians which one.

Now let’s talk about who the cut actually benefits, because Black’s affordability framing needs stress-testing against the real numbers.

BC’s income tax runs seven brackets, from 5.06 percent on the first $49,000 of taxable income to 20.5 percent on income above $260,000. A flat 20 percent reduction in rates does not produce equal dollar benefits across earners. It produces benefits that scale with income, because the brackets are progressive and the cut is proportional and therefore regressive.

I modelled four typical British Columbian taxpayers.

William is a single professional in Vancouver earning $294,000 — the approximate threshold to be in the top one percent of BC earners. Under current rates, his annual provincial income tax bill is roughly $34,700. Under Black’s plan, it drops to around $27,800. William saves $6,939 a year. That is $578 a month.

The Parkers are a dual-income family living in Kamloops earning the BC average of $66,000 each, $132,000 combined. Each earner saves about $557 annually. Combined, the Parkers pocket an extra $1,114 a year — $93 a month between two people.

Sarah is a single average income earner making $66,000 in Kelowna. Her saving is $557 a year. Forty-six dollars a month. Just over ten dollars a week.

Priya is a single mother working in Victoria and earning $38,000, below the low income threshold for a family of two. Her saving under Black’s plan is $253 a year. Twenty-one dollars a month.

William’s monthly windfall exceeds what Sarah saves in an entire year. It is 27 times what Priya saves in a month. The $136 million in additional debt interest BC would pay annually just to borrow the revenue lost to this cut while we wait for the anticipated growth to kick in (at a conservative four percent on new bond issuance) would permanently fund approximately 600 nurses at BC median nursing salaries. Instead it purchases nothing but a substantially larger monthly cheque for William and modest, near inconsequential, saving for everyone else.

This is not affordability relief. The affordability problem in BC is not that Priya’s provincial income tax rate is too high. It is that her rent is over $2,049 a month, that BC has the highest poverty rate of any province in Canada at 13 percent, that 25 percent of BC households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Twenty-one dollars a month does not move any of those numbers. It barely covers half a bag of groceries.

Black says the real payoff is investment and growth. He says lower taxes attracts high-skilled workers, draws businesses, expands the economy, and ultimately revenues recover. He points to 2001 as the evidence.

This is where I want to spend some time, because 2001 is a very specific historical moment and Black is directly asking you to treat it as a general proof of a universal principle.

Gordon Campbell, as a BC Liberal premier, cut personal income tax rates by 25 percent on average in his first days in office in 2001. The BC economy subsequently grew. The Fraser Institute calls it a blueprint. Campbell’s own chief of staff, Martyn Brown, is a believer to this day. But when Brown was asked directly about the measurable impact of those cuts, he acknowledged that having the lowest personal income tax in Canada gave BC a competitive edge saying, “although it is tough to quantify its positive economic impacts.” That is Campbell’s own chief of staff. The man in the room when the decision was made can’t quantify the economic impact.

And here is what the BC Business Council — not a left-wing organization — concluded when it analyzed the period of growth that followed. Its report, examining the difference between the stagnant 1990s and the Campbell-era expansion, makes no mention of taxation as a driver. It states instead that for BC, a small open economy, “external circumstances such as commodity prices, strength of the U.S. and Asian economies, interest rates, economic conditions in other parts of this country are important factors in B.C.’s economic performance.”

External circumstances. Not the income tax rate on a marketing manager in Kelowna.

Because here is what was actually happening in 2001 and the years that followed. A two-decade decline in global commodity prices ended suddenly that year, and demand for energy, base metals, and natural resources shot upward. The Bank of Canada’s overnight rate fell to generational lows — touching 2.75 percent by 2003 — making borrowing cheap, consumer spending easy, and housing investment boom. Canadian real estate entered the long structural expansion that would eventually see prices in some cities rise by 337 percent over two decades, generating billions in property transfer tax and economic activity entirely disconnected from personal income tax rates. Housing starts in BC grew 21 percent in 2003 and 25.8 percent in 2004. None of that was caused by the rate on the second income tax bracket.

When analysts looked at what BC’s Consolidated Revenue Fund — the province’s core government account — actually collected through the Campbell years, it declined as a share of GDP. The growth in government revenue came from natural resources, real estate transaction taxes, and the commodity super-cycle. Not from income tax receipts expanding as a result of supply-side stimulus.

Today’s conditions are the inverse of everything that made the post-2001 period work. Interest rates are elevated after the fastest monetary tightening cycle in modern Canadian history. There is no commodity super-cycle. The housing market is in a structural affordability crisis that suppresses consumer spending rather than generating windfall revenues. BC’s largest trading partner is in active tariff conflict with Canada. The conditions that happened to coincide with Campbell’s cuts do not exist.

And the research on whether personal income tax cuts specifically drive business investment is weaker than Black’s pitch requires. The evidence that corporate tax cuts stimulate business investment is reasonably solid. Personal income tax cuts are different. An NBER study found their effects on GDP are short-lived and statistically insignificant beyond three years. And the clearest statement on whether tax incentives drive business decisions came not from a left-wing critic but from Paul O’Neill, chairman and CEO of Alcoa, and George W. Bush’s own Treasury Secretary. Testifying at his Senate confirmation hearing, O’Neill said: “If you are giving money away I will take it. If you want to give me inducements for something I am going to do anyway, I will take it. But good business people do not do things because of inducements.”

That is a Republican Treasury Secretary, a lifelong corporate executive, saying plainly that tax incentives do not drive serious business location decisions. Demand does. Infrastructure does. Regulatory certainty does. A skilled workforce does. Not whether a real estate developer in Burnaby pays 16.8 percent or 13.4 percent on the portion of her income above $186,000.

Now look at the hole this cut leaves and what it actually compares to in human terms.

K-12 operating grants to all 60 of BC’s school districts total $7.3 billion for 2025-26. Black’s revenue cut is nearly half that entire budget, eliminated permanently from the treasury before a single efficiency saving has been identified or delivered. The child welfare budget stands at $4.3 billion — already exceeded by what BC pays in annual debt interest. The social services sector in total runs to $10.9 billion per year. Black is proposing to cut revenue equal to 31 percent of that entire sector on a promise that growth will eventually compensate, backed by a historical example that was driven by a commodity boom he cannot conjure.

And about those efficiency savings. Black says he can find three percent of government revenue in waste reduction; approximately $2.5 billion. But the cut he is proposing removes $3.4 billion from personal income tax revenue alone. His efficiency savings do not cover his own tax cut by nearly a billion dollars and that is before a single dollar of the existing $9.6 billion deficit is addressed. He cannot make his own numbers work on the most generous possible reading of them.

I have a simple question and I do not think it has been asked clearly enough.

If Black is confident enough in that $2.5 billion to make it a public commitment, why is his first act not to apply those savings to the $9.6 billion deficit and begin reducing a debt load that is already costing BC $4.4 billion per year in interest? Why does the money flow immediately to a tax cut that delivers $578 a month to William and $21 a month to Priya, while the debt that is eating the public balance sheet continues to compound?

A genuine fiscal conservative pays the debt down first and stabilizes the fiscal institution before making new spending promises. Acknowledges that a province running a deficit approaching $10 billion is not in a position to volunteer away revenue on the theory that growth will eventually compensate. That is not timidity. That is what conservatism actually means when it is operating in good faith.

Consider the provincial comparison Black’s argument requires you to ignore. Ontario’s provincial income tax runs from 5.05 percent at the bottom to 13.16 percent at the top. Manitoba charges 10.8 to 17.4 percent. Saskatchewan runs 10.5 to 14.5 percent. In the middle brackets — income between $100,000 and $140,000 — BC charges between 10.5 and 12.29 percent. Ontario charges 9.15 to 11.16 percent in the same range. The premise that BC’s tax burden in these brackets is chasing away investment runs directly into the fact that those brackets are already lower than Manitoba, competitive with Saskatchewan, and only modestly higher than Ontario; where investment flows regardless. BC had real economic growth in 2022 and 2023 with these exact rate structures in place. The problem is not the rate. The problem is global interest rates, housing costs, tariff uncertainty, and commodity prices. None of which a provincial income tax cut addresses.

And yet Black’s plan cuts those brackets too, at full cost to the treasury, on top of everything else.

I want to end on something that troubles me more than the specific numbers do, because the numbers are bad enough on their own.

Iain Black is running as a conservative. He spent three years on BC’s Treasury Board. He knows these numbers. He knows what $3.4 billion means against a $9.6 billion deficit. He knows that the 2001 comparison requires you to pretend that a global commodity super-cycle, generationally low interest rates, and a two-decade real estate boom were caused by the provincial income tax rate. He knows that Paul O’Neill exists, that the NBER exists, that BC’s debt service trajectory exists. He is not uninformed. He is making a choice about what to tell people.

The choice he is making is to lead with the policy that helps William the most, dress it in the language of affordability and freedom, and trust that Priya will not run the numbers. To point to 2001 and hope that nobody checks what commodity prices were doing. To package it as basic economics and bet that the word basic does the work that the evidence does not.

If I can find these gaps sitting at a kitchen table with public documents and a search engine, what happens when Black is standing at a podium in a provincial election campaign and a trained economist gets ninety seconds with the numbers? The answer is not good for Black’s fiscal credibility. The answer is the kind of thing that ends conservative campaigns and solidifies another BC NDP term.

What Black is proposing is not a plan for British Columbia. It is a tax cut for the province’s highest earners, financed by borrowed money, justified by a historical analogy that does not survive scrutiny, at a moment when BC cannot afford to be giving anything away. The people who need help most — Priya, the 253,000 on income and disability assistance, the BC households spending a third of their income on rent, the patients waiting for a nurse who isn’t there because we borrowed instead of hiring — they are not the beneficiaries of this plan. They are the ones who will absorb the consequences of it.

At the end of the day, I am just a humble front-line worker whose politics happens to be as blue as my collar. I did this math at my kitchen table. If I can see it, so can he. The question isn't whether Iain Black understands what this plan does. The question is whether he thinks you do. But if you’re anything like me, you know that not making ends meet isn’t the time to start cutting shifts and relinquishing overtime.

In 1867 the New Zealand parliament made a decision that looked, at the time, like a pragmatic compromise. Māori men were granted the right to vote but the existing property-based electoral franchise excluded most of them from the general rolls. The solution was four dedicated Māori seats, a separate electoral system running parallel to the general one. It was imperfect. It was contested. Critics on both sides had principled objections. The government of the day was not motivated by pure idealism. It passed anyway and New Zealand began building something across generations that nobody would now dream of undoing.

That is the whole story of the New Zealand model. Not a single transformative moment of enlightenment. Not a perfect design implemented by visionaries. A practical decision, made under political pressure, that created the structural conditions for something remarkable to grow.

Canada never made that decision. BC never made that decision. And 157 years later the distance between what that decision produced and what our avoidance of it produced is visible to anyone willing to look honestly.

The four original Māori seats survived for over a century largely unchanged. In 1975 Māori women were given full voting rights within the Māori electoral system. In 1993 New Zealand adopted Mixed Member Proportional representation, a change that transformed what the Māori seats meant in practice. Under MMP, voters cast two ballots: one for a local electorate member, one for a party. Parties win additional list seats based on their share of the party vote. This means Māori parties can win seats far beyond the seven dedicated electorates if their party vote is strong enough. The Māori Party has repeatedly entered parliament with more seats than the dedicated electorates alone would provide. Māori voters choose which electoral roll to join, the Māori roll or the general roll, and that choice is entirely theirs to make and change.

The practical result is structural and durable. Māori political interests cannot be ignored by any government that wants to form a majority. Māori politicians have held cabinet positions including Deputy Prime Minister. Māori-initiated legislation has passed. Coalition agreements have delivered concrete policy outcomes. This is not representation as symbolism. It is representation as leverage, the only kind that produces results.

Parliamentary representation alone could not resolve 150 years of accumulated historical grievances. Nor should it have been asked to. This is the second critical insight of the New Zealand model and the one most often overlooked in Canadian discussions of it.

The Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975 as a permanent commission of inquiry specifically empowered to hear Māori claims against the Crown for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. In 1985 its mandate was extended retrospectively to examine historical breaches going back to 1840. It investigates. It makes findings of fact. It makes recommendations. It has produced over a hundred major reports on everything from specific land confiscations to fisheries rights to the Māori language.

The Tribunal is not a court. Its recommendations are not automatically binding. But its findings have driven hundreds of millions of dollars in negotiated settlements between the Crown and specific iwi. More importantly it performs a function that courts cannot: it examines the political, historical and cultural context of grievances rather than reducing them to legal categories. It gives communities a forum where their history is taken seriously on its own terms.

The architecture is what matters. The Tribunal handles the past. Parliament handles the future. Neither track bogs down the other. Historical grievances are not endlessly weaponized in legislative debates because there is a dedicated institution specifically designed to hear and resolve them. Parliamentary time is not consumed by history because parliament is not the right place to adjudicate it.

Compare this to Canada’s approach. The duty to consult has been developed almost entirely through general court litigation, expensive, slow, case-by-case, producing narrow rulings that open new disputes rather than closing old ones. Truth and reconciliation processes have produced calls to action with no binding mechanism. UNDRIP has been incorporated into BC law with consequences nobody can agree on and courts are still working out. The historical grievance and the ongoing governance question are permanently entangled because we never built the institutional architecture to separate them.

The New Zealand model is not theoretical. It has been running for 157 years and its results are documented.

The Māori language — te reo Māori — was in serious decline by the 1970s. Parliamentary advocacy by Māori politicians led to the Māori Language Act of 1987, which gave te reo official language status. Kura kaupapa Māori, Māori immersion schools, were established and funded. Today te reo is taught in schools across New Zealand, appears on government signage, and is spoken by a growing number of New Zealanders with no Māori ancestry. A language that was dying is being revitalized. This did not happen through land acknowledgements or reconciliation frameworks. It happened because Māori politicians had real votes in the institution that controls education funding.

The Ngāi Tahu settlement of 1998 resolved claims arising from Crown purchases of South Island land in the nineteenth century. The settlement transferred approximately $170 million in assets and formal Crown apologies for specific historical wrongs. The iwi used those assets to build a diversified business portfolio now worth well over a billion dollars. A historical grievance, adjudicated through a dedicated process, converted into economic foundation. This is what resolution looks like when the institutional architecture is designed for it.

Co-governance of natural resources has been established through normal democratic process. The Whanganui River was granted legal personhood in 2017, not through litigation alone but through legislation negotiated between the Crown and Whanganui iwi after years of Waitangi Tribunal engagement. The governance structure gives the river legal standing and requires joint oversight. It is a model being studied by jurisdictions around the world.

Māori culture has not been absorbed or erased by parliamentary participation. It has expanded. The haka is the most visible example but it is not the only one. Māori design, Māori language, Māori values have entered New Zealand’s mainstream not because of government programs designed to promote them but because Māori had the political standing to make their culture matter in the institutions that shape a society.

The New Zealand model is not without conflict. Debates about who has the right to perform haka, moments where Māori feel parliamentary majorities are overriding their interests, disputes about the pace of settlements and the adequacy of remedies: these tensions are real and ongoing. They are also evidence the model works.

Māori have the standing to have these arguments publicly and on their own terms. When a grievance arises it goes to the Tribunal or the courts or the parliamentary floor, institutions with the capacity to hear it and respond. The argument happens inside the system rather than outside it. That is democracy functioning as intended. The alternative, which is what Canada has, is a system where fundamental questions about land and governance are permanently unresolved, permanently weaponized by politicians on all sides, and permanently outside the institutional reach of the people most affected by them.

BC is the most natural laboratory in Canada for a version of this model. The province has the highest proportion of unresolved Aboriginal title questions in the country precisely because so few treaties were signed. The legal uncertainty this creates is not abstract: it is measured in projects delayed, investments deterred, and communities still waiting for economic participation in the wealth generated from their territories.

BC’s legislature is unicameral. There is one chamber. Structural reform requires one decision, not the layered complexity of federal bicameralism. The province has a history of electoral reform discussion, a sophisticated Indigenous legal and political community, and — in DRIPA — a recently demonstrated willingness to acknowledge that the status quo is inadequate even if the response has been incoherent.

The proposal follows directly from the New Zealand precedent. Dedicated Indigenous seats in the BC Legislative Assembly assigned not by geographic riding boundaries but by national and cultural ones, seats held by representatives of Nations and tribal groupings with real votes on real legislation. A BC equivalent of the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent, properly resourced body with a mandate to hear and settle historical land grievances with finality. Repeal of DRIPA and replacement with legislation that actually delivers what DRIPA claimed to, permanent structural voice rather than an aspirational document that politicians invoke when convenient and abandon when costly.

The objection that parliamentary participation legitimizes colonial structures has been answered in New Zealand not by argument but by outcome. Māori identity and culture expanded under this model. Settlements were reached. Language was revitalized. Governance was shared. The communities still waiting for adequate housing and clean water in BC cannot afford to hold out for a theory of decolonization that has no practical mechanism and no timeline.

A Māori child in Auckland performs the haka at school assembly. A Māori politician sits in cabinet negotiating fisheries policy. An iwi uses its settlement assets to build a business empire. A river has legal standing because a Tribunal heard the grievance and parliament acted on it. A language that was dying is being spoken by people whose great-grandparents never heard it.

None of this was inevitable. All of it was built across generations, through imperfect institutions, by people willing to make practical decisions in the face of principled objections from every direction.

BC has the Indigenous cultures. It has the legal foundation. It has the economic urgency. It has a unicameral legislature clean enough to reform in a single decision. What it has lacked is the political will to make the offer.

The New Zealand experiment is 157 years old. The results are in. The only remaining question is whether BC is willing to look at them honestly and act.

The BC Conservative leadership race has produced something remarkable. Five candidates, months of campaigning, countless debates, town halls, donor dinners, and press releases — and every single one of them has arrived at the exact same answer to the most complex political and legal question facing this province.

Repeal DRIPA. Problem solved. Next question.

Iain Black wants it as Bill 1, day one. Kerry-Lynne Findlay pledged in Prince George that she will “get rid of DRIPA” because it is “an overriding, property-affecting, pan-provincial decision that will hurt us all.” Caroline Elliott wants to scrap it immediately along with all associated “land back” policies. Peter Milobar has it as a headline pillar with a tidy subheading about transparency and certainty. Yuri Fulmer lists it under “Protecting Your Rights” alongside opposing mandatory land acknowledgements, which at least tells you something about how seriously he has thought through the distinction between a symbolic irritant and a constitutional reality.

Five candidates. One crayon.

I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that DRIPA is good law. It is not. DRIPA is a clumsy, untested, and structurally unsound piece of legislation that replaced a functioning constitutional framework with a non-binding UN declaration embedded into provincial law — something no other jurisdiction on earth has had the audacity or the recklessness to attempt. The NDP deserves every bit of criticism it receives for passing it.

But here is what none of these five candidates will tell you, because apparently none of them have thought it through, or more likely because the people getting paid to run their campaigns have decided you do not need to know: repealing DRIPA does not repeal Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

Section 35 is not a piece of provincial legislation. It is not an NDP invention. It is not something any premier, Conservative or otherwise, can touch. It recognizes and affirms the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, and it was put there by the Crown — not by any government of the day, not by any parliament or legislature, but entrenched in the foundational law of this country. For those of us who believe that the Crown matters, that its obligations are real, that conservatism means something more than winning the next news cycle, this ought to land with some weight.

A true conservative looks at Section 35 and sees not a problem to be managed but a commitment to be honoured. The Crown made these commitments. We inherited them. That is how conservatism works — you do not pick and choose which inheritances to accept.

Repealing DRIPA does not close the courts either. The jurisprudence on Aboriginal rights and title in British Columbia did not begin with DRIPA and it will not end with its repeal. Decades of case law — Sparrow, Haida Nation, Tsilhqot’in — have built a body of legal reality that exists independently of any provincial legislation. Indigenous peoples in this province have the right to go to court. They have been going to court. They have been winning in court. A premier who repeals DRIPA and declares victory will find that reality waiting for them in the first injunction filed by the first nation whose title claim was not resolved by the repeal.

British Columbia is unique in this country and every serious person in provincial politics knows it. The vast majority of this land is unceded. There are no treaties establishing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers across most of this province. That is not ideology. That is history. It is a fact that shapes every resource project, every land use decision, every infrastructure corridor, whether DRIPA exists or not. The candidates on that debate stage know this, or they should. If they do not know it, they have no business asking for the job.

And then there is the political reality, which you would think five people running for the leadership of a party that wants to form government might have considered. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia are not the disorganized, marginal political force some of these candidates appear to be imagining. Over the past several decades, First Nations in this province have built functioning, sophisticated political organizations. They have legal capacity. They have financial capacity. They have relationships with Ottawa. They have international standing under the very frameworks these candidates want to dismiss. You do not have to agree with every position taken by every Nation to acknowledge that they are a serious and durable political force, and that any government that treats them otherwise will find itself in a prolonged, expensive, and losing battle on multiple fronts simultaneously.

I am not talking about blockades. Illegal obstruction of public infrastructure is illegal and should be treated as such by the relevant authorities, full stop. I am talking about the legitimate, lawful, and frankly formidable political and legal capacity of Indigenous nations in this province. A government that walks in on day one and repeals DRIPA without a credible framework for what comes next is not governing. It is performing.

Which brings me to what is really going on here.

Someone has been reading polls. The polls say British Columbians are uneasy about DRIPA. They are uneasy about land rights uncertainty. They are uneasy about project delays and cancelled investments and the fog of legal confusion that has descended on this province since DRIPA passed. The polls are not wrong about the unease. The unease is real and legitimate.

But reading a poll and issuing a statement calibrated to that poll is not policy. It is what the federal Liberals do. It is the thing conservatives have spent several decades — rightly — mocking the Liberals for. Trudeau’s government did not have principles; it had focus groups. It did not have convictions; it had approval ratings. Every position it took was reverse-engineered from whatever the polling said the public wanted to hear that week. Real conservatives looked at that and called it what it was: spineless, unprincipled, and ultimately dangerous because a government without convictions cannot make hard decisions.

Now look at this race. Five candidates. Same poll. Same answer. Same crayon.

Peter Milobar had the most revealing moment of the entire campaign at the final debate when Findlay raised questions about whether he could be trusted to follow through on repeal. Milobar took it as an accusation about his Indigenous wife and erupted — “Just say it: my wife’s Indigenous so you think I’m in conflict of interest.” It was a genuine human moment and I do not doubt the emotion was real. But it also told you everything about the quality of the policy conversation happening in that race. The most substantive exchange about the most important issue on the platform was a borderline racist personal confrontation, not a debate about constitutional law or governance strategy. Nobody on that stage was equipped to have the harder conversation, because nobody on that stage had prepared for it.

Caroline Elliott at least had the honesty to question whether the others would actually follow through under political pressure. She is right to ask. When a government faces its first major confrontation with a Nation asserting title rights — and it will, on day one, regardless of what legislation is on the books — the repeal-and-hope strategy will encounter reality. What then? Elliott did not answer that question either, but at least she gestured at it.

Findlay, to her credit, said something in Prince George that was more honest than anything else said in this race: you do not necessarily have to replace legislation with legislation. She is right. The answer to bad law is not always more law. The answer is sometimes better governance — real partnerships, real economic relationships, real engagement with Nations as the capable and organized entities they actually are. That is a conservative insight. It is a shame she did not build her platform around it instead of putting the repeal front and centre like everyone else.

I have written in this space about what a genuine conservative answer to this question looks like. It involves the legislature, not just the courts. It involves representation, not just consultation. It looks at what New Zealand has built over 157 years of genuine partnership and asks what BC can learn. It takes the complexity seriously rather than flattening it into a pledge that fits on a lawn sign.

None of that is in this race.

What is in this race are five candidates who have handed the keys to outside political operatives, many of which do not live here, who will not govern here, and who will collect their fees and leave when the election is won or lost. These are professional campaigners whose job is to win, not to govern, and the difference matters enormously. Winning requires a simple message that moves votes. Governing requires a workable plan for a complicated province. The people crafting these platforms have optimized for the former and given no apparent thought to the latter.

The voters being courted by this particular plank are not the future of the BC Conservative Party. They are a constituency of fear and reaction, and while their votes count the same as anyone else’s, building a governing coalition around them is a trap. A party that wins on the promise of a simple answer to a complicated question will spend its entire term in office being held accountable for the gap between what it promised and what it can actually deliver. That is not a foundation for government. It is a foundation for one term and a decade in opposition.

BC deserves better than this race is offering. Conservative voters especially deserve better, because the party that is supposed to value existing institutions, constitutional obligations, and the hard wisdom of the past is instead offering them a bumper sticker.

Five candidates walked onto that stage in Vancouver on April 24th. All five agreed on the main issues. That is not unity. That is a failure of imagination wearing unity’s clothes.

I want to talk about the Conservative leadership race but I need to start somewhere else, because the leadership race doesn’t make sense until you understand the province it’s happening in.

British Columbia runs about five and a half million people through a full provincial apparatus: Premier, cabinet, ninety-three MLAs, the ministries, the agencies, the Crown corporations, the authorities. That's roughly the population of the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto, across all three levels of government, municipal, provincial and federal, is served by seventy-five elected representatives for 2.8 million people. One for every thirty-seven thousand residents. We have ninety-three MLAs alone and that's before you count a single city councillor, school board trustee, or regional district director.

I live in Victoria. I use it as an example because I know it, not because it’s unique. Greater Victoria has thirteen municipalities and four hundred thousand people. It has ninety-one elected mayors and councillors at the municipal level alone. One for every 3,813 residents. On top of that sits the Capital Regional District with its twenty-four directors. The CRD describes itself, on its own website, with what I can only read as pride, as being supported by more than seventy-five committees and commissions. Then the school boards. Then the provincial legislature. The Fraser Institute, not an organization given to left-wing complaint, looked at this arrangement a few years back and called it a cacophony. They were being generous.

The point isn’t Victoria. The point is that this is what British Columbia looks like everywhere. Layer on layer of elected representation, regional districts and municipal councils and provincial ministries all touching the same problems, all able to point at each other when nothing gets solved, and none of them clearly responsible for anything. Each layer with its own budget to protect, its own jurisdiction to defend, its own institutional reason to exist and to keep existing regardless of whether it is solving anything. We have built an enormous amount of government to produce a fairly modest amount of governing.

And underneath all of it, threading through every ministry and agency and authority, is a public service with its own ideas about the pace and direction of change. I’ll just say what I’ve noticed. Ferry fares keep climbing. Tax bills keep growing. Services keep getting harder to access outside the Lower Mainland. And every contract cycle the public service union negotiates more: more pay, more protections, more reasons why this particular reform needs a working group and that particular change needs further consultation. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the one part of this apparatus that never seems to absorb any of the pain is the part that runs it. I’ll leave that with you.

What I will say is that a bold Premier on day one faces not just a legislature but a civil service with contractual, political, and institutional reasons to wait them out. To process the bold idea through seventy-five committees until it resembles nothing. To consult until the mandate expires. The apparatus is not designed to solve problems. It is designed to continue.

A real conservative should find all of this intolerable. Not because government is bad but because expensive government that doesn’t perform is a specific kind of theft — it takes money from ordinary people and converts it into process, into committees, into the diffusion of accountability so complete that nobody can ever quite be held responsible for anything. When the property tax bill arrives in January, and it goes up again, nine percent this year, ten the year before, who do you call? The municipality blames the province for downloading costs. The province points to the federal government. The regional district sends you a pamphlet about composting. The union files a grievance. The bill is real. The accountability isn’t.

This is the province five people are currently competing to govern. And watching them do it, I find myself wondering whether any of them have genuinely reckoned with what governing it would actually require. Because there are two possibilities when a politician looks at this apparatus honestly. One is that they haven’t looked. The other is that they have looked, done the math, and quietly decided that promising to fix it is a promise they can’t keep. I’m not sure which is more troubling.

Take BC Ferries.

The ferry system is highway infrastructure for a quarter of the province. Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, the Sunshine Coast, the communities up and down the coast — hundreds of thousands of people whose economic lives, whose healthcare access, whose family connections depend on a boat showing up on time at a price a working person can afford. The system has been expensively, chronically mismanaged for the better part of two decades. Fares have climbed to the point where some Island residents factor the cost of a crossing into whether they can afford to see a specialist in Vancouver. Service on smaller routes has deteriorated to the point where communities are making real economic decisions around whether the ferry will actually run.

Not one of the five Conservative leadership candidates mentions BC Ferries. Not a word. Not a single commitment in any platform from any of them.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it tells you something about where these candidates’ mental map of British Columbia begins and ends. It begins somewhere around the Massey Tunnel and ends somewhere around the North Shore. The coast exists as scenery. The islands exist as real estate. Not as places where people are trying to build lives and need a government that has thought about them.

But I also think BC Ferries is exactly the kind of problem that disappears when you’ve absorbed the logic of the apparatus. Fixing BC Ferries would require confronting a Crown corporation with its own board, its own union contracts, its own institutional culture, its own deeply ingrained reasons why the fare is what it is and the service runs the way it runs. It would require a Premier willing to spend political capital on a fight that doesn’t generate culture war energy, doesn’t activate donors, and won’t resolve quickly enough to claim credit for before the next election. The apparatus is not designed to solve that problem. It is designed to manage it, to study it, to consult on it, and to present the next government with the same problem slightly more expensive than before.

The municipal burden works the same way. The property tax spiral isn’t a mystery. The province sets service requirements, retreats from funding them, and the municipality picks up the tab with the only tool it has. It has been happening for decades and it is hitting hardest outside Metro Vancouver, where tax bases are thin, populations are older, and there’s no density dividend to absorb the blow. A family in Campbell River or Prince George or Cranbrook opening a tax bill that went up ten percent is experiencing something real and structural, not a local accounting problem. One candidate, Iain Black, gets close to naming this. He noticed a Metro Vancouver wastewater plant that ballooned from seven hundred million dollars to three point eight billion and has something to say about regional district accountability. But he frames it as a Metro Vancouver problem. The problem is provincial. The downloading is a choice the province keeps making and keeps not owning. And every ministry that would have to give something back to fix it has a deputy minister, a union local, and a committee structure with a reason to explain why now is not quite the right time.

Then there is DRIPA.

Every candidate mentions DRIPA. All five. It is the signature issue of this race, the thing that activates the base, the thing every platform addresses with energy and apparent conviction. The NDP’s implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into provincial law gets more space in these platforms than BC Ferries, the municipal crisis, and transit investment combined.

And the answer from all five of them is repeal.

I want to be careful here because I have my own views on DRIPA and they are more complicated than repeal. But I’m setting that aside because the point I’m making is narrower. Repeal is a sentence. It is the first sentence of a policy, not the policy itself. What comes after? What is the model for resolving land questions that have been unresolved since before this province existed? What fills the space that DRIPA occupied, however badly it filled it?

None of the platforms say. And I think that’s because DRIPA has culture war energy and culture war energy raises money and fills rooms, and the hard work of saying what you would actually do about Indigenous governance in British Columbia does not. So they show up for the issue that activates the base and go quiet on the issues that require having actually thought about the province. DRIPA also, usefully for a candidate, is a repeal. A repeal doesn’t have to survive seventy-five committees. It doesn’t require the civil service to move. It requires one bill and a majority. The apparatus can’t protect what you’re dismantling. Which may explain, more than anything, why it’s the one issue where all five candidates found their voice.

I don’t know what to make of that, entirely. Some of these candidates are clearly capable people. Peter Milobar spent decades in municipal and regional government and presumably knows what a regional district actually does. Kerry-Lynne Findlay has federal experience. Iain Black has more detailed policy than the others, even if it tilts heavily toward Surrey. These are not frivolous candidacies.

But capable of what is the question a leadership race is supposed to answer. Capable of winning a culture war argument, clearly. Capable of performing conservative conviction on the issues that Conservative voters are already activated about, yes. Capable of walking into the Premier’s office on day one, looking at the apparatus — the ministries, the regional districts, the Crown corporations, the union contracts, the seventy-five committees patiently waiting to process the bold idea into nothing — and still finding the will to govern boldly?

That I’m less sure of. And I’m not sure they are either. Which might be why the platforms read the way they do.

The status quo in British Columbia is not serving British Columbians. It is serving itself. The committees exist to produce more committees. The ministries exist to protect their budgets. The union exists to negotiate the next contract. The regional districts exist to justify the regional districts. And the people paying for all of it, in taxes, in ferry fares, in the slow deterioration of services they were promised, are somewhere outside the frame entirely.

What I keep coming back to is that this is supposed to be the conservative party. True conservatism, the kind that takes institutions seriously, that believes the job of government is to get the fundamentals right before it reaches for anything grander, should be most enraged by this. Not performing outrage about land acknowledgements. Actually enraged by a province that has built this much apparatus and is still getting the fundamentals wrong. The ferry should work. The tax bill should be explainable. The infrastructure should exist before the density arrives. These are not radical propositions. They are the baseline of competent governance.

Five people want the job of fixing that. So far, from what they’ve written down, I’m not sure any of them have found the province yet. And I’m not sure the province, as currently constituted, would let them govern it if they had.

Picture a New Zealand schoolyard. Children of every background, Māori, Pākehā, Pacific Islander, Asian, feet planted, voices unified, performing the haka together. The stomping. The tongue. The eyes. The ancient words filling a modern classroom with something that has no equivalent anywhere else on earth.

Now picture the All Blacks before a test match. The whole team. The whole nation in that moment. A war dance born in Māori tradition performed by every New Zealander regardless of ancestry, feared and respected by opponents from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo. Players who grew up in suburbs with no Māori ancestry performing it with a ferocity and pride that is entirely genuine. Because it is theirs too. Because New Zealand made it theirs together.

Now ask yourself the question this piece is built around.

What is BC’s equivalent?

What shared cultural moment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous British Columbians looks anything like that? What ancient tradition have settlers adopted with genuine pride and Indigenous peoples shared from genuine strength? What do we perform together? What do we have that a child of any background in this province can call their own while honouring where it came from?

Take your time. I’ll wait.

That silence is not a coincidence. It is not a reflection of cultural difference or geographic complexity or the particular difficulty of our situation compared to everyone else’s. It is the direct result of a policy choice. A choice Canada made and New Zealand didn’t. A choice to manage Indigenous peoples from outside our institutions rather than welcome them inside. A choice to consult rather than represent. A choice that has now been made consistently for over fifty years and produced nothing that looks anything like a haka performed by a whole society in shared pride.

The haka is not a government program. It was not designed by a ministry or mandated by legislation or recommended in a truth and reconciliation call to action. It emerged. Organically. Over generations. Because Māori had real standing in their society. Because they sat in parliament with real votes and real power. Because when you are a genuine partner in a nation rather than a supplicant outside it you share your culture differently. You share from strength. You share because you choose to. You share because the society around you has demonstrated through its institutions that it takes you seriously as an equal.

That is what the haka actually is. Not a performance. Not a symbol. Not a gesture. It is the living proof of what genuine political partnership produces over time. It is 157 years of a decision made in 1867 visible in a single moment: a schoolyard, a rugby pitch, a funeral, a graduation, wherever New Zealanders come together and reach for something that is authentically theirs.

Māori did not lose their culture by participating in shared governance. They expanded it until it became the culture of a whole nation. The scholars who warned that parliamentary representation would absorb and dilute Indigenous identity have been answered not by argument but by the All Blacks performing the haka in front of eighty thousand people in Johannesburg. You cannot argue with that. You can only ask why we don’t have it.

Some will point to ongoing tensions in New Zealand: debates about who has the right to perform haka, moments where Māori feel their rights are being overridden by parliamentary majorities. Good. Those tensions are not evidence the model has failed. They are evidence it works. Māori have the standing and the voice to have those arguments openly and on their own terms inside the institutions that matter. That is democracy operating exactly as intended. What you are seeing is not a broken system. It is a functioning one.

In BC we have land acknowledgements. Carefully worded statements read from cards at the beginning of meetings by people who often couldn’t locate the territory on a map or tell you a single thing about the Nation whose name they just mispronounced. We have government press releases about new consultation frameworks. We have academic papers about decolonizing institutional spaces written by people who have never been to the communities those spaces are supposed to serve. We have DRIPA — passed unanimously in celebration and now being suspended in panic.

We do not have a haka.

We do not have anything that a child of any background in this province can stand up and perform alongside an Indigenous elder and call genuinely shared. We do not have the cultural proof of political partnership because we have never built the political partnership that makes cultural sharing possible.

Not abstract policy. Not legal theory. Not another framework. The haka. What it represents. What it took to build it. And why BC, with its extraordinary Indigenous cultures, its vast natural wealth, its diverse and generous population, deserves to spend the next 157 years building something just as powerful and just as real.

New Zealand didn’t wait for perfect. They made a decision and built something across generations that nobody would now dream of undoing.

Somewhere in BC right now there is a child — Indigenous, settler, immigrant, all three in one — who will never perform anything together with their classmates that carries the weight of what they share. That is not inevitable. It is a choice. And it is one we can unmake.

Author’s Note: Today we are introducing something new to The Municipal Fly. Alongside our weekly newsletter you will occasionally find a piece filed simply under Essays — longer, more personal writing that follows no fixed schedule and arrives when an idea demands it rather than when the calendar requires it.

These essays are written in the first person and reflect my own thinking on issues as they arise — topical, sometimes unresolved, always honest. They are polished in presentation but deliberately unfinished in thought. That is the point. Michel de Montaigne, who more or less invented the essay as a form in the sixteenth century, called his pieces “attempts” — a trying-out of an idea rather than a declaration of one. That is what these are. I am not arriving at conclusions so much as thinking out loud in public, and inviting you to follow the process. I hope you find them worth your time.

I have been thinking about W.A.C. Bennett lately. Not the monument, not the dam that bears his name, but the man before all of that — the hardware store owner from Kelowna who left school after Grade 9 and had, by any reasonable measure, no business being Premier of anything. He built BC Hydro. He built BC Ferries. He declared the province debt-free. Seven consecutive elections. Twenty years. When I wrote about him recently I ended with this: Not grievance. Not culture war. Not a list of things to be against. A vision. A province to build. The audacity to believe you can.

I meant it as inspiration. I am less sure now that anyone is listening.

I have been a conservative for my entire adult life, though not always a card-carrying member of any particular Conservative party. I am not a conservative because of my position on vaccine mandates or trans-rights but because my natural inclination toward a solution to a problem is to look to what exists and what has been done before for insight and guidance. This is, I think, an important distinction — one that the current moment in British Columbia politics seems determined to erase. There was a time, not so long ago, when the federal Liberal Party was a perfectly comfortable home for people of conservative instinct. Paul Martin was there. John Turner was there. In this province, the BC Liberals housed the conservative vote for a generation; many federal Conservative MPs during Stephen Harper’s years were active BC Liberals as a matter of simple political geography, the two tents sharing more than they cared to admit. Conservatism, properly understood, has always been a broad tradition. It has had to be. Canada is a broad country.

Someone should tell Anthony Russo.

Russo is a Kelowna man — Bennett’s Kelowna, the same Okanagan light — who has appointed himself the conscience of the Conservative Party of British Columbia. He runs a media presence called Glorious & Free, through which he dispenses judgements about who is and is not a true conservative with the serene confidence of a man who has been granted this authority by someone. He has approximately three hundred followers on Twitter. He holds no elected office. He has no official role in the party whose soul he has taken it upon himself to save. None of this troubles him.

I should say here that I am not in a position to mock a man for his follower count. I have examined my own numbers and they do not embarrass him. But I am not, to my knowledge, publicly demanding the disqualification of candidates from major provincial leadership races. This is the distinction I would like to examine.

Russo’s current target is Caroline Elliott, one of five candidates in the race to lead BC’s official opposition, a race that will be decided on May 30th. I will be clear: I am not writing this as a defence of Elliott’s candidacy. I do not think she is the strongest candidate available to the party at this moment, and that is a view I am entitled to hold. What I am not entitled to do — what none of us are entitled to do — is demand that she be removed from the ballot before 42,000 party members have had the chance to make up their own minds. That is their right. It is, in fact, the entire point.

Russo disagrees. His grounds are these: during the pandemic, Elliott gave media interviews in which she questioned why, if British Columbia was mandating vaccines for public sector workers, teachers had been exempted. She was not calling for teachers to be vaccinated. She was pointing at what appeared to be an inconsistency in existing policy and asking about it out loud. This is, one might argue, a fairly conservative instinct — scrutinizing government decisions, demanding they be applied evenly, questioning the logic of the people in charge. One might argue that. Russo does not.

In Russo’s reading, asking the question is the same as supporting the mandate. Proximity to the idea is contamination. Elliott has since said clearly that she opposes mandates. Russo posted to Twitter this week — beneath a neon sign reading “Glorious & Free,” with the gravity of a man delivering a verdict — the following: You don’t go from pushing Mandates on Kids to leading conservatives without answering for it. What matters is what it says about judgment and values. Should this disqualify her?

She was not pushing mandates on kids. She was asking why one group of workers was treated differently from another. But that distinction no longer matters. The recantation comes too late and means too little because the test was never really about policy. It was about where you stood in the great tribal sorting of 2020 and 2021, which side of the line you were on when the line was being drawn. Elliott, in his judgement, was on the wrong side. You do not get to cross over. The gates are closed and Russo holds the keys.

This is worth being precise about, because it is the structure of purity politics and it is genuinely corrosive. It is not simply that the standard is high. Political movements are entitled to standards. It is that the standard is retrospective, immovable, and administered by people who were not elected to administer anything. If the members choose Elliott, Russo will not conclude that he was wrong about her. He will conclude that the members were wrong about everything. This is what it looks like when someone removes choice from the people they claim to serve, while insisting they are doing it for those people’s own good.

Russo frames all of this through his Christian faith, which he links explicitly and deliberately to his politics. He speaks of truth-telling as a moral duty, of the party’s corruption as a kind of spiritual failing requiring intervention. I want to be careful here, because faith in public life is not inherently a problem and I have no interest in making it one. But when a man himself draws the line between his religion and his politics, he invites scrutiny of where that line leads. And what I see, looking at Russo’s trajectory, is something that has a name in the tradition he claims: convert’s fire. He came to his convictions through genuine struggle — addiction, recovery, a whistleblowing episode at a Kelowna charity that cost him his job and gave him, briefly, a public identity. He found faith. He found purpose. And then he found, as zealots sometimes do, that the world beyond his conversion was full of people who needed to be corrected.

The whistleblowing was real and it was right. Exposing alleged theft from a faith-based charity took courage. But there is a kind of person who, having once found fraud, begins to find it everywhere — who discovers that the spotlight tastes sweet and that the role of moral guardian, once assumed, is difficult to put down. The question is no longer whether someone stole from a safe. The question is whether Caroline Elliott asked the wrong question about teachers six years ago during a pandemic that nobody fully understood as it was unfolding. The stakes have not risen. Only the appetite has.

Russo is not alone in this. He operates within an ecosystem of voices — some larger, some operating with rather more resources — that have made the policing of conservative authenticity into a full-time occupation. Wyatt Claypool, the Alberta-based co-founder of the National Telegraph who describes himself on social media as “Baptist. Zionist. Neoconservative,” and who was himself disqualified from a federal Conservative nomination by Pierre Poilievre’s own party, nonetheless has plenty to say about who qualifies as conservative enough in BC. Connor Gibson co-founded Common Sense BC with Aaron Gunn and helped engineer the takeover of the BC Conservative board in 2022 that set this whole current drama in motion. Tim Thielmann, now OneBC’s chief of staff, was fired from the BC Conservative caucus research office by John Rustad himself for promoting divisions within the party — then surfaced at OneBC, where promoting divisions appears to be the mission. And then there is Brittany Foote, a BC content creator who makes TikTok videos in pink and describes herself as a “conservative girl’s girl” with “traditional values” — the kind of fresh-faced digital presence a party trying to reach young voters might find appealing, and who has found her niche in this same ecosystem of ideological enforcement.

All of which brings me, uncomfortably, to Aaron Gunn — the man widely credited with catalyzing the modern BC Conservative surge and who is, in the telling of this particular story, both hero and cautionary tale. Gunn is now a federal MP. Before that he was, for a time, a BC Liberal. He sought the leadership of that party in 2021 and was disqualified — removed from the ballot because his views, the party said, were inconsistent with its commitments to diversity and reconciliation. He was furious. His supporters were furious. The principle of disqualifying a candidate for holding certain views was, in that moment, treated as an outrage against democratic norms.

I leave that irony where it sits, without embellishment.

Bennett, I think, would have found all of this baffling. Not because he was without conviction — he had plenty — but because his convictions produced things. Roads. Dams. Universities. Ferries crossing the strait on a Tuesday morning. His conservatism was a verb. It did things in the world. It could be judged by what it built.

What does this conservatism build? What I find, looking at the output of Russo and his fellow travellers, is a relentless subtraction. This candidate is not conservative enough. That position is disqualifying. This person has failed the test. The movement is being corrupted from within. The gates must be defended. It is conservatism as a process of elimination — which will eventually, if pursued with sufficient enthusiasm, eliminate everyone.

There is a certain irony in all of this that I cannot leave alone. The BC NDP has spent decades perfecting the progressive purity test — the careful auditing of language, the ritual denunciations, the long memory for ideological transgression. They are very good at it. It has not always served them well but it is at least their tradition, their particular pathology, the thing their movement does when it turns inward.

Conservatives used to be different. They used to be too busy building things.

If the BC Conservative Party is serious about forming government — about ending what is now years of NDP rule in this province — it might consider leaving the purity test to the people who invented it. They have enough competition without inventing more of their own.

Russo has never won anything. He has only decided who deserves to.

British Columbia has a problem that nobody in power seems willing to name honestly. After decades of court battles, consultation requirements, land acknowledgements, and reconciliation frameworks designed largely by non-Indigenous academics in comfortable university positions, we are no further ahead. Indigenous communities still wait. Resources sit locked in legal uncertainty. And the lawyers, consultants and theorists who built careers on this unresolved mess continue to collect their fees.

Look no further than the DRIPA debacle unfolding right now in Victoria. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act passed unanimously in the BC Legislature in 2019 to widespread celebration. BC’s Indigenous Relations Minister at the time repeatedly assured MLAs the act was aspirational in nature, meant only to provide guidance — upon passage there would be no immediate effect other than as an interpretive aid. Six years later two courts reached a very different conclusion. The BC Court of Appeal ruled in December 2025 that DRIPA should incorporate UNDRIP into BC’s laws with immediate legal effect — precisely what the NDP promised would never happen when they were scoring political points passing it unanimously. Now Premier Eby has backed away from his own proposed amendments after more than ten NDP MLAs expressed opposition in an emergency caucus meeting while the BC Conservatives are calling for full repeal.

There you have it. The NDP used Indigenous rights to signal virtue when it was convenient and retreated the moment it became economically uncomfortable. The Conservatives are using it as a wedge to mobilize their base. Indigenous communities are caught in the middle — again — while BC’s enormous economic potential sits hostage to a political fight neither party is having in good faith.

The unceded land debate is a perfect illustration of how badly we have lost the plot. When someone says 98% of BC is unceded they are making a statement that is simultaneously defensible and deeply misleading. Unceded means treaties were never signed — a procedural fact about Crown conduct. It does not mean Aboriginal title has been proven across BC’s vast mountain ranges, glaciers and remote wilderness that no human group continuously occupied or controlled. Courts have been deliberately narrow on this for good reason. The Tsilhqot’in decision in 2014 and the Cowichan ruling in 2025 established title over specific proven territories — not a blanket declaration over an entire province. But the word unceded does double duty. It is simultaneously a legal claim and a political weapon. And the people most responsible for deploying it as a weapon are not Indigenous communities waiting for clean water and economic participation. They are largely non-Indigenous academics and professional advocates shooting from the comfort of tenured positions, aiming for advancement up the ivory tower rather than genuine betterment of the people they claim to represent. Canada’s Indigenous policy has been captured by theory for decades. The communities those theorists speak for have paid the price.

The courts have made this worse not better. Aboriginal title litigation is extraordinarily expensive, agonizingly slow and structurally incapable of resolving what is fundamentally a political question about how we govern ourselves together. Each ruling opens new litigation rather than closing questions. Politicians cherry pick decisions for their own purposes. Nothing is ever actually settled. Pierre Trudeau understood the mirror image of this problem when he championed the Charter of Rights. His insight was that fundamental rights were too important and too vulnerable to legislative majorities to be left to parliament — entrench them in courts where they belong. He was right. The principle applies equally in reverse. Consultation disputes and Indigenous representation are too important and too politically complex to be ground through courts case by case at enormous cost to everyone including the Nations themselves. These questions belong in parliament where they can be resolved democratically with ongoing voice and real accountability.

New Zealand figured this out 157 years ago and the lesson for BC is direct and practical. Māori electoral seats have existed in the New Zealand parliament since 1867. Today there are seven dedicated Māori electorates alongside general geographic ridings. Māori voters choose which roll to join — their decision, not imposed on them. Under proportional representation introduced in 1996 Māori representation frequently exceeds those seven guaranteed seats as Māori parties win additional list seats. But New Zealand did something else equally important that Canada has never had the clarity or courage to do. They separated the backward-looking problem from the forward-looking one. The Waitangi Tribunal was established as a dedicated body to hear and settle historical grievances — land confiscations, treaty violations, past wrongs. It exists specifically so that parliament is not consumed by history and can instead focus on governance going forward. Two tracks running parallel. Grievances addressed. Representation moving forward. Neither bogging down the other.

The results are not theoretical. Māori politicians have held cabinet positions including Deputy Prime Minister. Māori language has been revitalized through legislation. Co-governance of natural resources has been established through normal democratic process. Crucially Māori culture has not been absorbed or erased by parliamentary participation — it has been strengthened by real political power. Scholars who argue that parliamentary participation legitimizes colonial structures should explain why Māori identity and culture expanded rather than diminished under this model. Ideological purity is a luxury that communities still waiting for adequate housing and clean water cannot afford.

BC should lead. The province has the most unresolved Aboriginal title questions in Canada precisely because so few treaties were ever signed. That makes it both the biggest problem and the most natural laboratory for a new approach. The proposal is straightforward. Establish dedicated Indigenous electoral seats in the BC Legislative Assembly assigned to Nations and tribal groupings — not bound by geographic riding boundaries but by national and cultural ones. BC’s unicameral system makes this cleaner than federal reform. One chamber, one reform, real representation where decisions are actually made. Establish a BC Waitangi equivalent — a dedicated tribunal to hear and settle historical land grievances with finality. Let the legislature handle the future. Let the tribunal handle the past. Keep the two tracks clean and separate. Repeal or fundamentally reform DRIPA and replace it with something that actually does what it always claimed to — give Indigenous peoples a permanent structural voice rather than an aspirational document that politicians invoke when convenient and abandon when costly.

The offer to Indigenous nations should be equally straightforward. Bring your claims to the institutions built to resolve them. Historical grievances and title disputes belong before a dedicated tribunal — heard properly, settled with finality, not dragged through decades of general court litigation that costs everyone enormously and never actually closes the question. Ongoing governance, resource decisions, land use, economic participation — those belong in the Legislative Assembly where Indigenous MLAs elected by their own nations sit at the table with real votes and real power. You do not have to abandon your claims. You bring them where they can actually be resolved rather than endlessly weaponized by politicians on both sides who benefit from keeping the wound open.

Some will refuse. They will say they want no part of a colonial system. Let them say it publicly. Let British Columbians see clearly who is committed to tangible solutions and who is committed to permanent grievance as a political posture. And to those well-meaning settlers who argue Indigenous peoples shouldn’t have to participate in colonial institutions — ask yourself whether you are speaking for Indigenous communities or simply over them. That is precisely the paternalism you claim to oppose.

BC is a vast and resource-rich province with tremendous economic potential. Its forests, minerals, energy and coastline represent generational wealth for everyone who calls this place home — Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. None of that potential is being realized while title disputes drag through courts for decades, while DRIPA ping-pongs between virtue signalling and panic, while the NDP and Conservatives use Indigenous communities as props in a political performance that serves neither them nor the rest of BC. Real representation ends that game. It puts Indigenous voices where they belong — inside the room where decisions are made, with the power to shape outcomes rather than the leverage to merely block them.

The perfect has been the enemy of the good for over 150 years. Indigenous communities deserve better than to remain pawns in an academic argument conducted by people who bear none of the consequences of being wrong. BC has the history, the legal foundation and the moral urgency to show the rest of Canada what real representation actually looks like. One chamber. Real seats. A tribunal for the past. A legislature for the future.

The question is whether we have the political courage to finally make the offer.