>>WORTH REPEATING

Nisga'a Treaty is more honourable than Vander Zalm | Patrick Nagle

Vancouver Sun Column [11/29/99]

The leader of B.C.'s Reform party has stooped to demagoguery to inflame popular passions denying the Nisga'a their rights

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VICTORIA - Occasionally an event occurs to defy the conventional practice of journalistic commentary. The first person pronoun is prohibited because careful use of language usually gives a reader better information from a third person viewpoint.

The exception to the rule occurred last week when Bill Vander Zalm paraded through the streets of Vancouver claiming his right to be heard by the House of Commons committee on the Nisga'a agreement. At this point I have to say I am entirely supportive of the agreement and its rapid passage. There now, it's done.

To return to Mr. Vander Zalm and his entirely gratuitous street theatre performance, let no one mistake what he is on about. The former premier wants to win an election. And, as he has shown in the past, he is prepared to do anything to achieve that goal.

This is what the voters of Delta South should be asking before Dec. 7: What does the Nisga'a agreement (in the isolated, farthest northern reaches) have to do with the elected representative of the fastest-growing region of British Columbia? Obviously nothing.

Delta voters should also be asking: What do the Nisga'a have to do with our unsatisfied need for decent public transit, our eroding access to proper health care or our continuing dismay about the anarchic state of child care in our riding and throughout the province?

The answer is that Mr. Vander Zalm is the leader of the provincial Reform party, whose electoral strength covers some of the same area as the Nisga'a settlement. He is part of a dedicated political movement intending to destroy the hard-won solution to a problem created by B.C.'s very entry into Confederation. The fact that this has nothing at all to do with Delta South is entirely extraneous to Mr. Vander Zalm's lamentable public behaviour.

His predictable lapse into demagoguery is in confusing contrast to his days as a Social Credit premier when he earned honest and widespread applause for being the first B.C. premier since Confederation to actually open the way for settlement of aboriginal land claims. Instead the whole Reform movement, federal and provincial, has let itself get derailed on the Nisga'a's issue based on an almost irrational belief that there is something slippery and unconstitutional going on to destroy forever the anchors of peace, order and good government.

How can this be? If the noise can be tuned out of the current uproar, a few salient observations emerge, based on that same constitutional promise.

To begin, the agreement was negotiated and legitimized in a manner consistent with the conduct of all public business in Canada; that is people of good will reach a settlement to be ratified by democratically elected legislators. All of the Reform movement's block-headed enthusiasm for dragging democracy through the streets as some sort of personal icon will not change that.

In terms of the law, which everyone seems to be personally and exclusively guarding these days, the Nisga'a agreement is fully justiciable. That means it is entirely testable in court.

And it will be. No freedoms are lost, no privilege gained by the process. The rule of law has been proven time and again to protect better a citizen's rights than any known concatenation of legislators.

Finally, given that many British Columbians regard land ownership as more sacred than human rights, the fear that the Nisga'a will have undisputed control of 19,000 hectares of land has inflamed the entire political landscape of the province.

The Nisga'a Nass lands are less than one-tenth the size of the Douglas Lake ranch in the Okanagan, a private corporation with enormous Crown grazing leases. No one in public life seems exercised to the point of televised public protest about the private sector controlling such a huge public property in a far more accessible territory than northwest B.C.

This is the basis of the Nisga'a settlement. This is all it means, no matter what Mr. Vander Zalm and his political allies try to make of it. After more than a century, the Nisga'a have legally negotiated the rights that have always been accepted as normal by other British Columbians.
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