Photo courtesy of the Corporation of Delta

CG: Has opposing the Tsawwassen treaty affected your relationship with the members of the First Nation?

LJ: I think in the long run our association will be a good one. It will take some time for my community to wrestle with the idea that the best land in the Lower Mainland —which is the land that has been transferred to Tsawwassen by the provincial government — the best land for food production will now be covered with containers from the port. The provincial government originally expropriated these lands from farmers many years ago and instead of giving the land back to farmers when they no longer needed it for roadways or anything else, the government turned it over to the band.

CG: These agricultural lands were part of the Agricultural Land Reserve established in 1973, a province-wide program that protected farmland from industrial development. Yet the Tsawwassen deal included 207 hectares of this land?

LJ: Yes. The Agricultural Land Reserve designated all of the good farm soils in British Columbia as a zoned agricultural area. In other words, you couldn’t put houses on them or shopping centres or gas stations. Only five percent of the soil in the whole province is capable of growing anything. We don’t have very much soil here because it’s all mountains. The Delta lands are among the very best, mainly because soil has been deposited here over thousands of years. Delta soil is very good for farming, very flat.

CG: What stands to be lost with the loss of agriculture? Are jobs at stake?

LJ: Yes, I guess to some degree. But I think it’s mostly about the loss of our ability to farm in British Columbia and not totally depend on the importation of our food from the United States. I think it’s an overall societal loss. If it’s done here, where else will it be done? There are Indian bands all over British Columbia. And it sounds like I’m being a negative person, but in British Columbia right now there are tremendous numbers of land claims. So if we are going to look at Tsawwassen as a template for other bands in the province, are there going to be other major agricultural areas converted to the use of containers or something else? The precedent has been set.

CG: Besides agriculture, were there other resource issues that raised concerns?

LJ: The question of fish on the West Coast is a big one still. The preferential fishing negotiated with the federal government (giving Tsawwassen band members exclusive commercial fishing rights based on their ancestry) is a huge problem for the rest of the fishing community because this will be the first of many treaties, and if you extrapolate it out, the Indian bands would be getting something like 170% of the fish on the West Coast, which of course is ridiculous, but that’s how it extrapolates out.

CG: If you were to speculate, what do you think this will mean for future treaties and resource management?

LJ: It will, in my opinion, be another precedent. And again, we're not casting aspersions on the Indian bands, but they are going to ask for as much as they can get, and if the government says, 'Yes, you can have it,' that's where my concern is. It's the governments saying they can have it and no one else can. We're talking about democracy, fairness and equity among all Canadians, and it's the federal and provincial governments that are not delivering that to the rest of the country. So once the precedent is set here, it will be set everywhere.

CG: You have also raised concerns about the non-aboriginal people who live in Tsawwassen lands being put in a position of taxation without representation. How many people will this affect?

LJ: There are over 700 people who live on the band lands but are not natives, but I think I'm conservative there. Those people lease land or lease premises, or own houses on leased land, and in the past these folks were taxed by the local municipality, which was Delta municipality, and they received benefits and they voted in Delta municipal elections and so on. This will not happen now when the Tsawwassen have their own lands. The folks who live there will pay taxes directly to the band, but in essence when election time comes, they don't get to vote in the band election. That was very much entrenched with all of us because taxation without representation was something that people fought for and died over.

CG: So those people won't have any representation through Delta or through the band?

LJ: That's correct. Now, what the provincial government has said is that they will set up a committee and these people can speak to the committee and try and sort things out. And that's fine—but it is still taxation without representation. I don't care what they call it. You don't have a vote; you can't kick somebody out of office because they raised your taxes. So, that was very important to a lot of the people who live there. And when the treaty is finalized, obviously they will have to abide by whatever the band council says they have to.

CG: Does the B.C. treaty process allow for input from neighbouring municipalities?

LJ: Very little. The provincial government created something called the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee, but it was basically a toothless tiger. It was a way of saying local government had input, but in fact that was not really the case.

CG: These treaty advisory committees were set up all over the province in the early 1990s. What is the problem with how these committees work?

LJ: As time went on, a lot of these local treaty advisory committees that were originally sponsored by the provincial government fell by the wayside because they got to be costly. The one that remained in the Lower Mainland was called the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee, but there hasn't been much that has come from it. One of the reasons I believe this has not worked very well is the fact that the committee was dealing with the bureaucrats from the provincial and federal governments. They weren't dealing with the elected people from Victoria or Ottawa. So, it would go around and around, around and around and around, and there were never really any motions in place; they just discussed things. And that's still going on today.

CG: And that was the only opportunity for municipalities to have a say?

LJ: Yes. And one of the biggest problems with all the discussions about treaties from the very beginning in the 1990s, was that everything has been in secret. The public never had a chance to look at it or find out about it. The press didn't know anything about it. It was all secret.

CG: You mean the details of what was being discussed were not available to the public?

LJ: Yes, anything to do with fishing or agricultural land or giving up land or money or any of that. It was all done behind closed doors, and that's one of the reasons that Delta opted out of that treaty advisory group two or three years ago, because we said we are not going to keep all this information secret from the people of Delta. The secrecy of these things is absolutely unacceptable in this country as far as I'm concerned. The treaties are signed by the band, the provincial government and the federal government, and local government is not even in the picture.

CG: As a politician you inherit issues of the past, so is it difficult to be critical of an effort that is ostensibly attempting to make amends for past wrongs against First Nations people, while still representing your constituency?

LJ: I think my role is very clear. We are dealing with the year 2008. I've been raised in Canada to believe that we are all equal and we should all have equal rights, and equal responsibilities and equal opportunities, whether it's language or jobs or anything else. What I'm finding as I age, though, is some people are more equal than others.

CG: What is your outlook moving forward?

LJ: Senior governments have spoken and we'll have to carry on. I'm not sure what will happen in the future with other treaties. There are some people who are concerned for the future in terms of the agricultural lands, the fishery and the issue of taxation without representation. But, nonetheless, all I can do is tell you we hope to move on and have a good relationship with the band as we move forward.

The treaty was driven by the Gateway - the provincial plan to expand the port and connect it with new and wider highways. This ignores the collapse of the US dollar, the steep decline in cross Pacific container traffic, the availability of new routres such as the North West passage and the widened Panama Canal and the key role played by the railways in moving transcontinental freight. All these issues are dealt at length in my blog - stephenrees.wordpress.com and on the Livable Region web site
livableregion.ca.

This is typical of the short term thinking that bedevils our political system. We need to take a strategic view of how our world is changing - and how to cope with that. Unfortunately, the appeals to justice in the TFN process have been ignored by the grab for the quick buck. A sad day for Canada and the Tsawwassen, who both deserve much better leaders with real vision

The TFN treaty was done without proper consideration of the Semiahmoo First Nation treaty, the protection of our Agricultural Land Reserve, or the Environment. This is not about giving TFN its due... its about expanding DeltaPort at the expense of our farmland, the Fraser River estuary, and our air quality in a area that shouldn't have been considered for a port in the first place. Tsawwassen First Nations accepted individual cash payouts from the government for signing the treaty and now we will all have to live with the blight of container sprawl on some of the best farmland and most important wildlife habitat in the world.

Just a few miles to the North in Richmond we have another parcel of the prime agricultural land that is currently under the review of the Agriculture Land Commission to be probably released from the ALR and be developed into the mixed residential area - our beautiful 136 acres Garden City Lands. The First Nations people needs are used as a reason for the land to be developed again so they can get their money and we can loose another parcel of the land that could feed our children. Their children need to eat as well - all our children will suffer in the future because the land, once developed, will be lost for the agriculture forever. There is not enough appreciation for the value of the undeveloped land now.