Juno News - B.C. homeowners warned their land may not be theirs

00:00:00.000 And welcome to Straight Up. I am your host, Mark Petroni. Is your home really yours? What if a

00:00:13.100 judge decides that the land on which your home sits rightfully belongs to somebody else? Somebody

00:00:19.900 like, for instance, First Nations people. That scenario happens to be playing out in Richmond,

00:00:25.060 British Columbia, where Mayor Malcolm Brody has sent a letter to residents affected by the

00:00:31.000 B.C. Supreme Court's recent land title decision. That decision suggests goes as follows. It granted

00:00:37.960 the Cowichan Nation title to large swaths of Southeast Richmond and fishing rights in the

00:00:44.800 Fraser River. Residents are understandably upset. You can imagine why and concerned. Here's Kat

00:00:51.520 Canada with her take. Is there even a point to strive for home ownership in British Columbia

00:00:59.240 if the government can just say, hey, you know what? 150 years ago, someone may have fished

00:01:04.640 near here. So now we have to seize your land. So residents have been warned that their property

00:01:10.060 ownership could be compromised. The mayor's letter included a draft map outlining areas

00:01:15.680 affected by the ruling. It reads as follows. For those whose property is in the area outlined

00:01:21.440 in black, the court has declared Aboriginal title to your property, which may compromise

00:01:27.460 the status and validity of your ownership. This was mandated without any prior notice to

00:01:33.540 the landowners. The mayor announced a public meeting will be held at Richmond City Hall on

00:01:39.340 October the 28th to talk about that. Promises to be a barn burner. Now the court decision is

00:01:45.960 under appeal, but if it's upheld, the precedent set in British Columbia could allow Indigenous

00:01:51.540 nations to claim title over entire cities, suburbs, farms, and infrastructure in huge parts of the

00:01:59.960 country. Now Lauren Gunter is a political columnist for the Edmonton Sun and has some thoughts about

00:02:05.460 that story. We'll be chatting with Lauren in a few minutes from now. We're now about two weeks from the

00:02:10.200 release of the federal budget. Conservative leader Pierre Polyev has called on the government to cut

00:02:15.340 taxes and keep the federal deficit under $60 billion, under $42 billion, sorry. And that may be a tall

00:02:24.660 order given that the current estimate has the deficit at well over $70 billion. Now in a letter to the

00:02:31.120 prime minister, Polyev said Canada has become a country of empty bank accounts, empty fridges,

00:02:37.480 and empty stomachs. Here is Polyev last month saying there needs to be billions of dollars in cuts

00:02:44.400 in this conversation on CTV News. There needs to be billions of dollars of reductions in the federal

00:02:51.520 bureaucracy and we need to cut the consultants in half. So he should cut the budget for consultants by

00:02:59.360 at least $12 billion. And what about the budget for public service workers, which right now is at

00:03:04.080 $71.5 billion? Well, we should reverse the cost of the bureaucracy back at least five years to the

00:03:11.880 pre-COVID era. I mean, how is it that we were able to deliver all these services five years ago with 40%,

00:03:19.460 30% less bureaucrats and less bureaucratic spending? We don't need more bureaucracy. We need to leave money

00:03:26.840 in the pockets of entrepreneurs and workers who will generate the real growth for our country.

00:03:32.440 Now, Interim Parliamentary Budget Officer Jason Jacques said last month the deficit will rise to

00:03:39.400 nearly $70 billion. As I said, we're a couple of weeks away before we find out for sure. Now,

00:03:46.120 British Columbia Premier David Eby says lifting the tanker ban off the northern coast of his province

00:03:52.520 would lead to cuts in other real investments that need the support of coastal First Nations peoples.

00:03:59.400 He says the current oil tanker ban is needed for the support to maintain support for other economically

00:04:06.920 important projects. Eby wants the federal government to reaffirm its support for the tanker ban off the

00:04:12.600 west coast. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wants that ban lifted as part of her government's proposal to

00:04:19.240 build an oil pipeline to the west coast. And Loren Gunter joining us. He's a longtime journalist and

00:04:25.720 columnist with the Edmonton Sun. Loren, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Mark. Let's talk a

00:04:31.320 little bit about this collagen situation. I mean, imagine being a homeowner in Richmond right now,

00:04:36.760 and you get this letter from the mayor saying, oh, by the way, that home that you have, that you think you

00:04:42.920 have, well, it might just be on First Nations territory. And so your title may not exactly be

00:04:50.440 legit. You know, what would go through your mind? Yeah, for sure.

00:04:55.400 I mean, imagine what's going through the minds of those residents.

00:04:59.720 Yeah, the mayor said that he's going to hold a meeting next week to discuss what the options are,

00:05:06.280 and there is an appeal of the decision that's going to a higher court. But that could take another couple

00:05:11.720 of years and who knows what the First Nation wants to do in the interim. It would be very unsettling

00:05:19.400 as a homeowner to put all of that money into your largest investment in your entire life,

00:05:25.240 and now be worried that you couldn't sell it because you don't own the land it's on in fee simple.

00:05:31.160 Yeah, imagine that. I guess the value of that property is now seriously impacted.

00:05:37.160 Yeah, I would think so. It depends. There is a community in West Kelowna that is on First Nations

00:05:47.000 land, and you pay an annual lease to the First Nation for the right to use that property for

00:05:55.080 your home. And the First Nation has been very good about it. They know that that's a large source of

00:06:01.400 their income, so they don't want to wring the neck of the golden goose. But there's nothing to say

00:06:08.760 that they can't at any time decide they don't want all those houses there and they will just cancel the

00:06:14.600 leases. Yeah, they may decide there's more money in condominiums or something else. And so I can't

00:06:22.440 imagine that they are allowed to do anything until this matter winds its way through the courts, goes

00:06:28.200 through the appeals process. But in the meantime, you've got all this uncertainty in the minds of

00:06:32.360 the residents. So do you do a big reno? Do you add to your patio or your deck? Do you improve the outer

00:06:44.440 look of your home? Do you do any of that stuff? Because you aren't sure two years from now or four

00:06:51.160 years from now whether you're going to be the owner of that house or not.

00:06:54.840 And there's also the implications, you know, the broader implications nationally. I mean,

00:07:01.480 sure, this is a B.C. court decision, but if it's upheld, it could have all sorts of

00:07:07.080 ramifications right down the road. Yeah, especially if it goes up to the

00:07:10.440 Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court rules in the way the Superior Court in B.C. did, then yeah,

00:07:16.280 it'll be it will be national. To me, this goes back to the sort of the nice puffy stories we've created

00:07:29.160 around like land acknowledgements. You know, you can't go to a speech or a concert or a hockey game

00:07:37.560 where there isn't a land acknowledgements. Well, we're really, really sorry we're on

00:07:42.200 Treaty 6 land, but we are, and so thanks very much. This has created this impression

00:07:51.160 among an awful lot of non-Aboriginal progressives and among a lot of First Nations people

00:07:58.200 that this whole idea of land back. We took all their land, now we have to give it back. It's

00:08:05.720 given it credence. It's given it sort of an official stamp because particularly at public

00:08:12.680 events, particularly at government events, there are elaborate land acknowledgements

00:08:17.560 that give the impression that, you know, there's something that we can do to return this land.

00:08:25.480 I mean, the treaties were very clear. The treaties that were signed on the prairies, which is a

00:08:31.160 this is a problem in B.C. because they didn't have treaties, but the treaties particularly that are

00:08:35.320 signed on the prairies said, you know, you agreed to give up title in perpetuity in return for basically

00:08:43.080 what we now think of as health, education and welfare, and a suit of clothes for the chief

00:08:49.800 every two years. That's in a lot of the prairie treaties. So it's not in question. The whole idea

00:08:58.680 of land back is crazy because in the treaties that were signed, there's an awful lot of indication that

00:09:08.200 you know, you're giving up Aboriginal title. Now, B.C. is a different matter. 110% of B.C. is under land

00:09:17.560 claims, and they didn't have treaties. And I mean, they're overlapping and conflicting land claims. And

00:09:25.800 it's a real mess. But for 30 years now, our courts have been slowly, gradually adding to the list of

00:09:34.200 precedents of the idea that Aboriginal title was not extinguished. And that's going to lead to more and

00:09:45.720 more decisions like this. There was a group of hunters yesterday sent me a photo of a sign that's

00:09:52.120 recently been posted on public land, partly reserved, partly public land, at the south tip of Lake

00:09:59.640 Winnipeg. And it says you are entering territory that was the traditional grounds of whatever band it is.

00:10:12.440 And so you are not allowed to enter, hunt, fish, or do anything on this land without the express

00:10:19.800 permission of the chief and band council. Well, you know, how? Under what authority does that happen?

00:10:28.920 You know, First Nations simply cannot put up a sign and say, I'm sure you can't come onto public land

00:10:34.760 because we have a claim against it from time immemorial. That's always the line that they use,

00:10:41.320 time immemorial. And there have been cases for the last two years in B.C. where two of the most

00:10:46.600 popular provincial parks just north and east of Vancouver have been closed for hunting season for

00:10:54.520 September and October because the First Nations in the area claim they have ceremonial rights that they

00:11:04.280 have to perform in those areas. And they think they should have exclusive rights to hunt and fish in

00:11:13.080 those lands. And the government of B.C. has gone along with this. The government of B.C. did not ask the RCMP

00:11:17.720 to go in and open up the parks. It didn't say, you know, you have no right to do this. It played along

00:11:24.200 with it. And all of those concessions, all of that nice, nice talk has led to what's happening in

00:11:31.480 Richmond. Yeah. And when you think about the jurisdictional areas, issues around that, the fact that

00:11:39.240 some of these reserves have been used to bring in guns from the United States, I mean, that's generally

00:11:45.880 how firearms, illegal firearms ends up end up in the hands of people in Toronto and Vancouver and

00:11:53.400 Montreal and other cities is through that gateway. Yeah. My understanding is that the vast majority

00:11:59.320 of them don't come in through reserves, but we have several reserves that straddle the U.S.-Canada border

00:12:05.800 and Canada Border Service Agency and the RCMP are not allowed to stop First Nations people in those

00:12:16.520 reserves from driving back and forth across the line. And I remember, oh, it must be 20 years ago now,

00:12:24.040 there was a case in Alberta where all sorts of machine guns had been brought in at the reserve that

00:12:32.120 goes from Browning, Montana, just south of Cardston, Alberta, because no one was allowed to interdict

00:12:40.440 the vehicles and inspect them. So it is an issue that Ganesawagi, the Ganesawagi, sorry, near Montreal,

00:12:50.440 same thing. Back when you remember the Okra crisis, they were bringing guns back and forth across the line

00:12:57.640 all the time. And so it is an issue and we have to deal with it in a more sensible way. I don't think

00:13:06.040 we can say, sorry, First Nations, you have no claim on this. No, they do. And I would love to see more

00:13:14.360 partnerships between governments, industry and First Nations to develop pipelines, to develop

00:13:21.560 oil sands, to develop whatever other malls, shopping malls, develop a mall and let the First Nations in

00:13:30.760 the area in on the profits. Fine. I think that's doable. But right now, this idea that we don't have

00:13:39.320 rights to our own property, which was begun in BC in 1790. So, you know, over 200 years, we don't have

00:13:50.600 rights to that. That's just one of those judicial myths, like the decision in Toronto that there's

00:13:57.400 a God-given right to bike lanes, that it was a charter right that you should have a bike lane.

00:14:03.880 Judges have gotten a little bit out of control. Paul Jay

00:14:06.680 Yeah, these activist judges are going to be paying close attention to this decision out of the BC

00:14:12.520 Supreme Court. Municipalities should be paying close attention. And I'm just reminded of all these

00:14:17.800 woke mayors out there like Olivia Chow are going to say, Oh, yeah, bring it on. You know, we have to

00:14:23.960 give up this section of the country or this, this part of the city. And I was just looking at some of

00:14:29.480 the territory that I mean, we're talking about huge stretches of Canada that might qualify under, you

00:14:36.440 know, unseated land that might fall under this ruling. We're talking about Vancouver, Victoria, most urban

00:14:43.080 centers, Montreal suburbs, James Bay, which is a massive area, Halifax, rural properties, Thunder

00:14:53.080 Bay, Sudbury and St. John's and Fredericton. So this is something that should be on the radar screen,

00:14:59.400 you know, from one end of the country to the other. And all you can do is kind of hope that the,

00:15:05.320 you know, cooler heads and saner heads prevail, as this goes through the appeals process. What do you

00:15:11.080 think? I hope so. But the Supreme Court recently forced out one of its members who probably had the

00:15:22.120 best understanding of land claims and property rights, because the Chief Justice didn't really

00:15:30.440 care for him. So I think that this Chief Justice is a very activist justice. And I think that if this

00:15:39.400 goes up to the Supreme Court, they will probably shave a little bit here and a little bit there,

00:15:44.360 and it won't be quite as extreme as the BC Superior Court. But, you know, this is likely to go through

00:15:52.680 the courts. And can you imagine very many federal politicians saying, hey, wait, this is ridiculous.

00:16:01.400 This is, Aboriginal title does not supersede your land, your property rights, or your, the title you

00:16:10.200 hold to your home. But I can't, like a lot of them have spent all it, because most of them grow up

00:16:17.720 and live in large urban areas where this doesn't really apply to them. The interesting thing about

00:16:23.880 the Richmond one is, you're now talking about a large section of a well-off urban area. And so,

00:16:32.840 suddenly it does apply to an awful lot more people. But typically, they've been willing to trade away

00:16:39.560 rights to pipelines or to develop mines or because it happens in a remote area where none of them live.

00:16:48.840 But if it starts to happen to their homes, well, then maybe they'll change their minds a little bit.

00:16:56.520 Well, let's talk about pipelines as long as we're kind of on the topic here. Because you talk about

00:17:02.040 some of the most lame excuses ever for not supporting, you know, wide open tanker traffic

00:17:09.080 in Northern BC. I mean, David Eby came out and said, well, you know, we need that ban in order to

00:17:17.880 provide us social license with the Indigenous communities and produce and do other projects.

00:17:24.680 Like, what other projects are going to come close to how lucrative something like this would be, you

00:17:31.160 know? So, you know, he's saying, well, you know, this gives us social license through our interaction

00:17:36.920 with these Indigenous communities, you know, maintaining the ban. And as a result of that, we

00:17:41.560 can't allow tankers anymore. To me, social license is a charade. It's something that politicians talk

00:17:53.560 about when they have no intention of approving whatever the project is, because they can come

00:17:59.640 back to you and say, at the end of the day, well, you know, we tried to find social license

00:18:06.280 to build this pipeline to create this coal mine, this oil sands project, but it just wasn't there.

00:18:17.400 So it's the lack of social license that caused us to put it. But what does that mean? It's so

00:18:24.360 amorphous a term that it hides a multitude of sins. You can do whatever you want behind social license.

00:18:32.760 That Brise government tried to do that with Trans Mountain XL. They tried to do it with Coastal Gas

00:18:41.720 Link. And thankfully, there were a couple of projects there that finally got put through,

00:18:49.240 because they were just so lucrative. Coastal Gas Link, for instance, is the one that takes liquid

00:18:55.320 natural gas from northeastern BC down to the coast. And it was approved by the elected First Nations

00:19:05.800 governments all along the route. The owners of the pipeline have been very careful. They've negotiated

00:19:12.200 very good deals to share in the profits with all of those First Nations. But then the hereditary chiefs,

00:19:21.880 who in most cases are simply appointees of the elders, they don't have the democratic legitimacy of

00:19:30.760 being elected by the members of the First Nation. They said, a lot of them said, no, no, no,

00:19:36.760 no, this is no good. It's going to ruin our traditional lands. And the federal government,

00:19:41.720 which didn't want the pipeline anyway, then suddenly found this great respect for hereditary chiefs,

00:19:50.040 which superseded the democratic decisions of the First Nations. So I can't see a time when the

00:20:00.200 politicians, either provincial or federal say, yes, well, we're going to use the Constitution's

00:20:07.720 interprovincial trade authority to push another pipeline from northern Alberta through to the

00:20:14.520 to the West Coast. And, you know, the thing Eby says, he says that we need to preserve the pristine coast.

00:20:24.600 There are tankers from Alaska running down that coast right now. And how do you say they're running

00:20:31.240 down right now? How do you know that? Because they run up and down that coast all the time. And they go

00:20:37.080 to refineries in Washington State, they go down to refineries in California. And what's the difference

00:20:44.600 if we have a few Canadian tankers along the way too? He said, well, you know, you have to go in through

00:20:50.680 this very, it's called Douglas Street. And you have to go into this very narrow passage. And

00:20:56.040 there are rocks. Yeah, I know. But you can you can map all of that out. You could put an automated

00:21:02.200 tanker in there with GPS and a computer nav system. And it wouldn't hit a single thing. So these are all

00:21:10.680 just phony excuses by suburban progressives to make themselves feel better about saving the environment

00:21:18.360 and rescuing the planet. And so that's what unfortunately, that's what the very real

00:21:24.200 economic arguments in favor of a pipeline. That's what they're up against.

00:21:27.800 Paul Jay Meantime

00:21:28.920 Meantime, you've got Alberta Premier Daniel Smith, who's trying to get another pipeline built. I guess

00:21:35.720 this would be what son of Northern Gateway. I'm not sure what they're calling it, but trying to make her

00:21:41.720 case with the federal government, which is reticent at best anyway. So she's got opposition on both

00:21:48.840 sides, you know, with the British Columbians, as well as the Feds. And the frustration is building in

00:21:55.480 Alberta as a result of this intransigence. Well, you can see in what the Feds have been talking about,

00:22:03.240 they don't want any more pipelines. But if they're going to have a pipeline, they want one to the West

00:22:08.280 Coast. Because if you're going to finish off the one to the Maritimes and open up shipping to Europe,

00:22:17.640 there's a huge market in Europe for our natural gas and oil. That pipeline could be busy every day,

00:22:25.640 365 days of the year, and every tanker's in and out. And it would add to the federal government's

00:22:33.400 revenues by probably about three or $4 billion a year. You could do that easily. And then you could

00:22:39.560 employ tens of thousands more people and you could have a growing economy rather than a stagnant one.

00:22:46.680 But the pipeline to the East has to go through Quebec. And the Liberals are not prepared to risk

00:22:52.440 their 44 seats in Quebec because their voters in Quebec are very anti-pipeline. So are most of the

00:23:00.760 Bloc Québécois. If you look at the most recent polls, Quebecers as a whole are about 56% in favor

00:23:08.120 of a pipeline to the West Coast, but under 30% in favor of one to the East Coast. So again, it's one

00:23:15.400 of those things where not in my backyard. Sure, you're going to have it over there in BC, but not in my

00:23:21.160 backyard. But the Liberals are so afraid of losing their Quebec seats. They don't care about the

00:23:29.400 economics. They don't care about the $3 billion lost. The number one priority of Liberal politicians,

00:23:37.080 always, big L Liberal politicians in Canada, is to be reelected. And so that's all they care about.

00:23:44.520 Yeah, absolutely. We're a couple of weeks away from the budget, this long-awaited budget,

00:23:49.640 and there's talk that the deficit could be in the $60 to $70 billion range, maybe even higher.

00:24:00.040 Now we have the leader of the opposition, Pierre Polyev, saying, no, you've got to keep it at $42

00:24:05.400 billion, and that's going to mean spending reductions. It was steep and deep spending

00:24:11.240 reductions. So he's issued this letter to the government, Mark Carney, asking for not only

00:24:19.240 spending cuts, but tax cuts. To me, this runs counter to how these people are wired. Nobody's

00:24:25.160 going to get that. Yeah, no question. They're not going to do that. I think it's quite simple when

00:24:31.080 you look at the federal budget to determine where the fat is, and it's in the civil service. In the last

00:24:37.880 10 years, under the Liberals, the federal civil service has grown by 40%, 40% in a decade.

00:24:45.080 Isn't that amazing? And the federal payroll has grown by 70% because most of the 40% they brought

00:24:52.200 in are executives, managers, consultants. They're higher level. They're not people who are down at

00:24:57.800 the ground serving Canadians. So we're paying 70% more for bureaucrats than we were a decade ago. And I

00:25:06.840 defy anyone to point to a service that has improved 70% in Canada in that federal service. There aren't

00:25:15.320 any. Two summers ago, you couldn't get a passport in under six months. You get this all the time.

00:25:21.240 And the Parliamentary Budget Office said there's seven layers of bureaucracy on top of just about

00:25:29.160 every frontline worker in every department in the federal government. So things get passed up,

00:25:34.360 the line back down. You get passed up two notches and back down. And you got passed up six notches

00:25:38.760 and back. And it just takes forever to get anything done. And so nothing's getting done by the federal

00:25:44.760 government. I think you have well over 350,000 federal employees. We could probably get by with

00:25:53.720 fewer than 250. And you would save an enormous amount of money, but they're not going to do that.

00:26:00.280 You know, the last estimate I heard from one of the senior, one of the major bank's senior economists

00:26:09.560 was it could be in the $95 to $100 billion range, the deficit.

00:26:14.600 I've heard that number too.

00:26:15.960 But what you're going to get from Carney is a shell game. He's going to have capital

00:26:24.040 expenses that operating. Yeah, with that really operating expenses, money around until it looks

00:26:32.600 like they've done some, some austerity, but none of it will be there. You know, it'll take me,

00:26:39.800 I used to go through federal budgets in about it in about an afternoon, and you could see what the

00:26:46.120 big numbers were, you could say, Oh, look, this, this increased this much. I think now it's going to

00:26:50.120 take a day and a half or two days because you got to go looking for the things they're hiding.

00:26:54.520 But, but no, I am not optimistic at all that the November 4 budget will contain tax cuts,

00:27:01.480 economic consent. There's any of the things that we need at this point.

00:27:05.400 Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is, is the debt going up or isn't it?

00:27:08.680 Yeah. You know, and then you could play all these games as much as you want in terms of

00:27:14.520 operating budgets over here and capital budget here. And we're not going to include the investment that

00:27:19.880 we make in this area or that area, you know, so is the debt going up? Is the debt going up and how

00:27:27.320 much is it going up? Absolutely.

00:27:29.080 Answer that question. In 2013, the Alberta Premier was Alison

00:27:33.640 Redford and her finance minister was Doug Horner. And they tried this capital versus operation thing.

00:27:41.160 And, you know, if you started digging, you could find all these operational expenses that were over on

00:27:45.880 the capital side. But the thing about this is maybe you win an election with that kind of

00:27:53.160 sleight of hand. But investors aren't like if you're going to invest a few billion dollars in

00:27:59.160 a Canadian economy, you're going to go through that budget with a fine tooth comb and find out where the

00:28:05.800 weaknesses really are. So this will not help investment. We already have the slowest investment

00:28:11.880 per capita of any G7 country. We have the slowest growth in the OECD. So that's all of the developing

00:28:18.920 nations in the world. Yeah, it's 28 countries, I think. And the OECD thinks we will have the

00:28:25.960 slowest growth rate through to 2040. Isn't that something? Amazing. Lauren, thank you so much for

00:28:33.720 coming on the show. Great job. Good fun. Lauren Gunter, longtime journalist with the Edmonton Sun.

00:28:40.840 And that is it for this edition of Straight Up. Appreciate you tuning in, my friends. Let's do it

00:28:45.160 again real soon, shall we? Bye bye for now.

Juno News - October 20, 2025

B.C. homeowners warned their land may not be theirs

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