Public debate has an enduring fondness for panic. Every so often, experts and other spectators warn that Indigenous rights, UNDRIP, or the latest court decision will usher economic calamity into British Columbia. The public discourse after the Gitxaala and Cowichan decisions has been one of those moments, but these decisions don’t spell calamity, although they are consequential. They compel Crown governments to confront legal facts that have existed for generations, but which governments have avoided and left for others to resolve.
This article continues the conversation from our December 16 webinar on the Gitxaala decision (2025 BCCA 430) and British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). One question kept coming up: what does this mean for the economy? The question itself is not new. It echoes earlier moments of alarm, particularly in the wake of Delgamuukw in the 1990s. Then, as now, history belies alarmism. Economic uncertainty does not arise from recognizing rights. It arises from postponing recognition.
Gitxaala did not create new dangers to the status quo. The court applied settled principles concerning the Crown’s duty to consult, access to justice, the role of courts in resolving legal disputes, and government accountability. The court confirmed that UNDRIP operates as a lens through which constitutional limits on government authority come into sharper view.
A familiar drama: the panic after Delgamuukw
When Delgamuukw was decided in 1997, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en plaintiffs did not obtain recognized title to their territories. The Court ordered a new trial, which never occurred. Nevertheless, public commentary immediately called catastrophe. One newspaper warned that the decision placed British Columbia’s prosperity “in peril” and risked “explosive political problems.” In Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition predicted economic uncertainty across every sector dependent on land or resources, with consequences severe enough to cripple the provincial economy.
None of this came to pass. And it was never likely to. Delgamuukw, like Cowichan and Gitxaala, did not radically rewrite the law. It merely allowed the courts to elaborate on well-established law. Even colonial authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accepted that Indigenous peoples possessed rights to their territories. British Columbia’s present condition—where most land remains unceded—did not arise from judicial overreach. It arose from the Crown’s long habit of deferring its legal and moral obligations, despite courts placing the task of negotiating reconciliation squarely on governments.
Unceded land: a fact too old to be shocking
The British Crown has never been ignorant of Indigenous Nations or their territories. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 barred settlers from purchasing Indigenous land and reserved that task to the Crown, establishing the framework for treaty-making.
Even colonial courts elsewhere acknowledged this reality. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall—hardly a critic of colonization—described Indigenous peoples as “the rightful occupants of the soil,” holding claims that were “legal as well as just.” The decision ultimately constrained those rights within a colonial framework by assigning ultimate title to the Crown. But it did not deny Indigenous possession, territoriality, or the need for lawful surrender. On the contrary, it rested the colonial land regime on the premise that Indigenous peoples already held the land, and that their rights had to be addressed before others could claim it.
Colonial law did not question whether Indigenous peoples existed as Nations. It simply supplied rationales for not dealing with them honourably. On that foundation, Calder recognized Aboriginal title in British Columbia more than fifty years ago. Since then, governments have known precisely what the law requires: negotiation and settlement. That most of British Columbia remains unceded reflects not legal uncertainty, but political delay.
Prosperity’s inconvenient companion: rights
Canada cannot build lasting prosperity on the fiction that unresolved rights will somehow resolve themselves. Economic resilience depends on legal clarity, and legal clarity requires recognizing Indigenous rights.
Shortly before the Cowichan decision, a report published by the Fraser Institute argued that adopting UNDRIP would help clarify and strengthen Indigenous property rights. The report emphasized that free, prior, and informed consent should be understood as a mechanism for reducing transaction costs, not increasing them. Strong property rights and Indigenous ownership, it concluded, tend to reduce project development costs and increase returns by lowering risk, shortening disputes, and improving certainty.
The report’s author, Lawrence Schembri (a former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada), had a similar analysis in earlier remarks delivered in 2022 to the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association. He argued that Canada as a whole stands to gain from an Indigenous economy that is empowered to realize its full potential. He pointed to several concrete trends:
- the Indigenous population is young and projected to grow by more than 50 percent by 2041;
- between 2006 and 2016, employment among Indigenous people grew by nearly 45 percent;
- in recent years, the share of Indigenous people living off reserve with a university degree has increased at roughly twice the rate of the non-Indigenous population;
- Indigenous self-employment has grown at more than double the rate observed among non-Indigenous Canadians; and
- Indigenous small and medium-sized enterprises export goods and services at rates comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, those of non-Indigenous SMEs.
Mr. Schembri described this as a “tremendous untapped potential,” one that becomes accessible when public institutions and private firms commit to economic reconciliation rather than continuing to treat Indigenous rights as a secondary consideration.
The virtue of government doing the work
Leaving reconciliation unfinished produces exactly what critics claim to fear: conflict, delay, litigation, and uncertainty. These outcomes impose real costs on governments, communities, and businesses. But when governments respect Indigenous property rights and settle what should have been settled long ago, they will replace friction with clarity.
Reconciliation does not threaten economic stability; it supplies it. For a province that has spent generations deferring unavoidable work, embracing UNDRIP offers a credible path to long-term economic stability.
Ruben Tillman