Indigenous Representation is a Conservative Value

The conservative case for Indigenous representation

Photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash

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.

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Stop Consulting. Start Representing

What Do We Perform Together?

The New Zealand Model

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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.