In one of the dumbest legal decisions ever made in Canada, a judge ruled that Indigenous land title extends to places like Richmond, BC. This means that the Cowichan Indigenous Band has land title over it, and could potentially seize private property in urban areas like Richmond. This is insane.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Yesterday in British Columbia, we had what may be one of
00:00:06.840the dumbest legal decisions ever made in Canada come down. A judge ruled after a five-year-long
00:00:13.760court case that yes, Indigenous land title also extends to places like Richmond. If you don't
00:00:21.160know Richmond, it's a city connected to Vancouver that is a mixed urban and suburban area. But now
00:00:28.020the Cowichan Indigenous Band has land title over it, and it means presumably that if you're the
00:00:34.360government or private resident and you want to build a house or you want to make major renovations
00:00:40.120to your house, put up a shed, you may need to get Indigenous Band Council approval by the Cowichan
00:00:46.400Band in order to do so. Because this is what already happens in places like Powell River. If you want to
00:00:54.000build a wooden dock off of your property into the water in Powell River, you may have to go through
00:00:59.920an archaeological dig, you may have to pay for an Indigenous consultation, you may need extra
00:01:05.680environmental inspections in what is in effect a reconciliation industry shakedown. So what this
00:01:12.700judge has done is said that those shakedowns can extend into urban areas where everyone would have
00:01:18.760laughed at you for suggesting that it would have gone to just a couple of years ago. This is absolutely
00:01:25.900insane, and I'm going to break it down for you guys in this video. But before we get into it, I just want
00:01:31.760to say if you are a resident of British Columbia, if you are a voter in British Columbia, check out the
00:01:38.660petition I have in the description of this video below, as well as pinned to the top of the comments. I work with
00:01:44.760the 1BC party, and we are trying to push back on this attack on property rights and make sure that we
00:01:51.300change the laws and we try and change the charter in Canada in order to prevent these shakedowns from
00:01:57.120happening, in order to prevent people from having effectively their private property stolen from them,
00:02:02.640or they now have to share it with people who don't have any real legitimate claim to the land other
00:02:08.980than these historically wide sweeping claims that because it's historical territory, they must still
00:02:15.960have title over it and decision making powers for it. But anyways, now let's get into it. The first
00:02:23.760person to report out on this court case was Caroline Elliott, who said on X,
00:02:29.660A bombshell judgment was released yesterday by BC Supreme Court declaring aboriginal title
00:02:36.820over land in Richmond, including private property. If this stands, it has massive implications for
00:02:43.320private property across BC. Read the highlighted sections for yourself. The one thing I would say,
00:02:49.020and Caroline Elliott has been very good on this particular file, but one thing I would say is that
00:02:53.540private property already was undermined by previous decisions, like what is going on in Powell River,
00:02:59.000like what happened on Haida Gwaii, which I believe used to be the St. Catherine Islands. Those areas had
00:03:06.340already been basically fully given over to indigenous bands. They had full land title over it, which meant
00:03:11.740you have these insane stories out of Haida Gwaii, where because somebody was related to someone who was
00:03:17.280dealing drugs, and I believe murdered somebody, they had their house bulldozed, and the BC government
00:03:22.700didn't do anything about it because it's the band's land. They can technically bulldoze a house that,
00:03:27.160you know, it doesn't matter because it's their land. They can do what they want with it.
00:03:31.500Extending that logic to Richmond is absolutely insane. The idea is that the band council could
00:03:37.100potentially seize your house from you or say that you can't build a new house after tearing down the
00:03:42.240old one because they first need to do a bunch of consultations inspections unless you pay a bunch of
00:03:47.300money. But she suggests that you should read the highlighted sections for yourself, and that is what
00:03:53.320we are going to do with this decision. So it says here, Cowichan Aboriginal title burdened and burdens
00:04:01.300the land over which the crown grants of fee simple interest were issued. I find that the Cowichan
00:04:08.560Aboriginal title, which is grounded in the prior occupation of the Cowichan ancestors and the
00:04:14.200constitutional protected interest in land, is a senior interest in land vis-a-vis the fee simple titles,
00:04:23.260which derived from the crown grants. Basically, the whole idea is that fee simple land means that
00:04:30.280you purchased it, it's your land. But the judge is saying because the crown is the arbitrator over
00:04:37.780what fee simple land is, meaning that it used to be crown land, that means that because basically the
00:04:44.640judge is ruling that crown land has basically Indigenous land title over it, that if the crown says that
00:04:51.720you have fee simple land title, that is then undermined by the fact that Indigenous groups have
00:04:59.040land title on the crown land that was then made fee simple, so then the fee simple land has Indigenous
00:05:05.340land title over it. It's absolutely insane. And this whole case is about whether or not the Cowichan
00:05:12.820Indigenous Ban Council can control what the government builds. It obviously extends into this private
00:05:19.320property question because the judge admits it. The judge admits that absolutely, this does affect fee simple land
00:05:25.740because the crown is what granted the fee simple land, and we are talking about whether or not the crown has the
00:05:31.920Indigenous land title, the Aboriginal land title that rules above it as another area of authority on the land. So in this
00:05:40.480next section, it says, I agree that Aboriginal title is a prior and senior right to land. So they're saying it is above both crown land, and therefore it's also above private property because the crown is what designated this area as fee simple.
00:05:55.480They go on to say, it is not an estate granted by the crown, but rooted in prior occupation. It is constitutionally protected. The question of what remains of Aboriginal title after the granting of fee simple title to the same lands should be reversed.
00:06:10.480The proper question is, the proper question is, what remains of fee simple title after Aboriginal title is recognized in the same land. So she is saying that because it's fee simple, that doesn't mean we'll determine the small aspects where Aboriginal title still exists.
00:06:25.480She's saying the reverse. She's saying the reverse. Let's see how much private property rights really still exist in the city of Richmond now that we are recognizing Aboriginal title over the territory.
00:06:36.480Let's be clear. This is seized territory. It is ceded to the crown. It is ceded to the Canadian government. The Canadian government, who could do whatever it wanted with it, it then allowed people to be able to purchase the land and make it their own private property.
00:06:53.480We're not walking things back because the reconciliation industry realized that there was a lot of money to be made in claiming that they actually do in fact have title over large urban areas, just as they do large swaths of mostly unoccupied land and the rest of the province, which still creates massive problems with getting major projects done or people being able to just be able to control their own property.
00:07:16.480Because they're also trying to do this in the Peace River area. This is what independent MLA, Jordan Keeley has been blowing the whistle on. In his area, they're basically determining that potentially like 70% of all the land in the area could have Indigenous title put onto it, which means that you can't really build or do anything with it without permission.
00:07:37.380Which then causes a lot of corruption issues because if you need their permission to do every little thing with your private property, well, you have an incentive structure to create a system where you need to pay money in order to have inspections done, in order to have consultations done, in order to have environmental overviews done.
00:07:57.040They can now do that, and that is what they do in places like Powell River. The pure violation of property rights is what's going down in Haida Gwaii right now.
00:08:07.160But now I need to move on to an area of hypocrisy, because one of the people who just came out and said that this is bad is somebody who set up the infrastructure for this to happen.
00:08:20.900This ruling in Richmond is based off the Haida Gwaii precedent, based off the St. Catherine Island precedent.
00:08:27.040B.C. Conservative leader, who was the Indigenous minister under Christy Clark, came out to say private property rights are the foundation of our democracy and our country.
00:08:38.840Any decision that attacks our private property rights needs to be appealed and overturned.
00:08:43.980Indigenous title and private property rights cannot coexist over top one another.
00:08:48.000Losing private property rights on your home, your land, and undermining the rights that underpin our country is wrong.
00:08:55.080Reconciliation cannot be achieved by taking rights away from one group and giving them to another.
00:09:02.000Well, that's a very odd thing for John Rustad to say, considering that he supports DRIPA and UNDRIP.
00:09:08.480He will say that he supports repealing DRIPA, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act,
00:09:14.420but then he says he wants all of his policy, if he becomes premier, guided by UNDRIP, which is the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
00:09:22.420and it's what the current federal government does, uses, in order to deny major project, like, permissions and grants and whatnot right now on a federal level.
00:09:31.560But now let's jump over to the response from one BC leader, Dallas Brody,
00:09:37.840who I thought had a great takedown of John Rustad pretending that he really cares about what happened in Richmond.