Most Canadians have never heard of UNDRIP, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. It is a treaty that the federal government signed on behalf of Canadians without any meaningful public debate, without any referendum, and without any honest disclosure of what it actually obligates Canada to do. What this treaty requires is so consequential that if Canadians understood it clearly, there would be a national conversation that those in power have no interest in having.
At its core, UNDRIP obligates signatory nations to vest property ownership back into the hands of the Indigenous Peoples who preceded European colonization. In British Columbia, we are already watching this play out in real time. The federal government has moved to transfer land in the Vancouver metro area, to the Musqueam Nation. We are talking about a band with fewer than 2,000 members receiving jurisdiction over land that is home to approximately 2 million Canadians. The government has not released the terms of the agreement. Canadians are being asked to accept a seismic shift in property rights without being permitted to read the document that governs it.
