This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Karen Restoule, June 1, 2026
“Today’s legislation is a crucial step toward true and lasting reconciliation.” On Oct. 24, 2019, British Columbians were told by Premier John Horgan that adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into provincial law would serve to advance reconciliation, and “build a better future with good jobs and opportunities for people, strong environmental protections and healthy communities that include everyone.”
Today’s reality? Support for reconciliation is on the decline. The provincial adoption of UNDRIP is pushing Canadians beyond their comfort level for well-intentioned Indigenous policy.
A mere decade ago, following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and 94 Calls-to-Action, which included a recommendation for the domestic adoption of UNDRIP, Canadians strongly supported Indigenous reconciliation. The Angus Reid Institute’s 2015 polling found that 63 per cent of Canadians were optimistic that the Truth and Reconciliation process would lead to a better future for Indigenous peoples. Fast forward to September 2025, Leger polling revealed more than half (54 per cent) of Canadians now believe too much attention is being directed toward reconciliation.
Recent polling also shows us the decline in support for reconciliation is especially true in BC. A May 2026 report that focuses on the link between the decline of support for the B.C. NDP and their supportive role on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), shows that just 51 per cent of British Columbians believe there is still work to be done on reconciliation, with 41 per cent believing that “enough has already been done on reconciliation and no more is needed.”
British Columbians feel they have been tricked into supporting a policy that is more destabilizing than they had been led to believe. This, in turn, has sparked discussion around race-based policy across the country. As Geoffrey Moyse and Warren Mirko argued for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute “in a liberal democracy, the merit of an argument does not flow from race or bloodline” and that when “ancestry becomes qualification, debate shifts from evidence to identity.”
Until recently, it would have been political dynamite to even imply that race-based policies should end. Today, concerns are being raised by pragmatic centrist types who have been supportive of the reconciliation consensus and who are nonetheless trying to wrap their minds around why governments are creating separate legal frameworks for First Nations characterized by undefined limits with profound implications for the entire province. In my experience Canadians in B.C. and beyond still understand the need for reconciliation and the settlement of legitimate legal disputes, where they are challenged is in aligning with the incoherent way governments choose to pursue it.
When DRIPA was passed in 2019, British Columbians were reassured by the B.C. NDP that this legislation would “give us a path forward, creating clarity and predictability for all people in British Columbia” and would “create opportunities for Indigenous peoples, for B.C. businesses, for communities and for families everywhere.”
Long before the DRIPA bill made its way across the BC legislature in 2019, Dwight Newman and Ken Coates from Macdonald-Laurier Institute warned that key concepts presented by UNDRIP, such as “free, prior, and informed consent,” would create chaos and increase uncertainty for resource development projects across the province.
In 2016, even the federal Liberals’ Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, warned against UNDRIP implementation at the Assembly of First Nations. In a recent article, she shared with us the message that she delivered clearly to the Chiefs: “…simplistic approaches, such as adopting the Declaration as being Canadian law, are unworkable and, respectfully, a political distraction to undertaking the hard work to actually implement it.” She went on to point out that B.C. and Canada would have known that passing legislation that incorporated UNDRIP without a clear implementation framework would lead to confusion and frustration — they had been warned by her and other experts at the time.
My colleagues at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute also warned that governments were overlooking the legal and practical implications of legislating UNDRIP into B.C. and federal law. In 2016, Ken Coates and Blaine Favel warned that, “implementing UNDRIP in full — that is, enshrining every provision in Canadian law and policy — would not only be impractical, it could undermine recent progress towards greater economic opportunity and self-sufficiency for Canada’s Indigenous peoples.” Later, in 2017, MLI’s Ken Coates and Dwight Newman wrote: “UNDRIP was not drafted as a piece of Canadian law and thus did not take into account the complexities of constitutional, legal, and political relations between Indigenous peoples and the Government of Canada.”
But those warnings were dismissed as being “anti-Indigenous,” a point that Coates and Newman also addressed: “There is nothing wrong — and much that is important — about an intense Canadian discussion about UNDRIP and its applicability in Canada. Policy reform is urgently required and full Indigenous involvement in policy-making and priority setting is essential. More resources, applied to Indigenous-defined needs, are necessary. It is much less clear that turning this process into primarily a legal exercise… is a good thing for Canada.”
The B.C. government is feeling the heat of mounting public pressure to repeal DRIPA. They themselves, the architects of DRIPA in Canada, appear confused as to where the province should go from here.
All of this should worry Ottawa. In 2021 Justin Trudeau followed B.C. and made UNDRIP part of Canadian federal law. With Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambitious agenda on major projects, the UNDRIP policy prescriptions of his predecessor could very well clog the Carney government’s wheel.
Karen Restoule is the director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
