On April 2, 2026, Premier Eby announced that his government would suspend key provisions of DRIPA for up to three years. He told First Nations leaders the province cannot “eat the whole elephant” of UNDRIP all at once. His rationale: the BC Court of Appeal’s decision in Gitxaala requires the province to align all its laws with UNDRIP at once, and the government cannot manage that scale of change. Put plainly, the Premier says reconciliation demands of him too much, too fast.
Premier Eby’s reasoning mischaracterizes how DRIPA works.
DRIPA does not ask the Premier’s office alone to implement UNDRIP, across every statute. Instead, it asks every person engaging with the law to do their own part. It asks ministries, regulators, Crown departments, and everyone applying the law to work alongside First Nations to apply laws consistently with UNDRIP. Only where laws cannot align with UNDRIP must government discuss how it may be realigned. Distributed work was, and is, the plan. DRIPA’s design was not a command-and-control structure, but an instruction to the whole of government: “begin”.
What the Premier describes is nothing like how DRIPA does and must operate. Reconciliation must inform every day interactions, in every area of life touched by law. Where alignment is straightforward, it simply occurs. Where alignment faces a legal barrier, government then must sit down with First Nations to work through the difficulty. DRIPA does not demand that the executive align all laws now. What it demands is that every arm of government start the reform process, and then keep going.
The Premier has proposed suspending this reform process for up to three years, until the Supreme Court of Canada rules on Gitxaala. But consider the logic on its own terms. If the Supreme Court of Canada agrees with the Court of Appeal, does the government still have a capacity issue? If not, has government ever had a capacity issue? If not, then what are the real reasons for cabinet wholesale halting reconciliation processes under DRIPA?
Ultimately, the Premier has cycled through a series of “solutions” to DRIPA, all aimed at putting off the aligning of BC’s laws — or perhaps specific laws — with UNDRIP. The elephant in the room is not whether the courts have misinterpreted DRIPA as legally-enforceable, but what interests now warrant the government urgently avoiding its own reconciliation apparatus.
Lisa C. Fong, KC